


Thunder and Fury

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [32]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-08 21:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 33
Words: 37,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6874057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A re-telling of the events of Fury Road, now with more daemons! Tags will update as chapters are posted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It had been weeks since they’d exchanged a single spoken word. The only thing they’d heard, besides the roar of the engine and the hiss of sand, were the ever-present whispers of their ghosts. Epharia had wandered off during the night, leaving Max to guard the car and his supplies. He forced himself to his feet as the sun grew hotter, growling at the stiffness in his bones. Stomping back and forth across the hill he’d camped at, he curled his lip to whistle for his daemon. 

_Where were you Max?_

Glory’s voice seemed like a scream in the silence. She didn’t appear, but her hauntings had been getting worse. 

_You promised you’d help us_.

Max wasn’t even sure anymore if the leaving that drove him would stay quiet if he died. What if he became another ghost, wandering endlessly? 

(What if he already was one?)

_Max. Max Rockatansky._

Epharia heard the engines before he did. The daemon darted down the hill behind him, dust flying from her feet, and her panic had him moving before the whoop of a War Boy had reached his ears. She stayed silent while he kicked empty cans aside, tossed his bedroll into the back without worrying about how much of his supplies fell out, and Epharia leapt into the car, her heavy body flying past his ear as Max pushed himself into the driver’s seat. It took precious seconds for the engine to scream alive, for the wheels to catch on the loose dust, and all the while the sound of eager shouts and hungry engines echoed through his daemon’s dingo ears. 

They were outmatched from the beginning – his Interceptor was slow and full of cracks in the axles, and he couldn’t take her fast enough even over flat ground. Just before they flipped, when the bikers and the ugly maws of the chasers were looming in the corners of his eyes, a ululating wail broke through Max’s fragile concentration. Old Billy Daku rose up out of the dust, his eyes wide and a gun in each hand and a scarlet fountain for a throat, just like he’d looked the moment he’d died. Max’d had to shove him out the window of a different car, while the man’s kangaroo daemon faded into Dust next to Epharia in the back seat.

The lance hit his gas tanks. The gas tanks that, like in every other car he had driven for more than a mile, he’d rigged with explosives _anyway_. Max lost his hearing in the blast – no time to worry on whether or not it was coming back. The car was flipping, and he couldn’t hear anything but ringing, but he was almost glad because it meant he couldn’t hear the ghosts either, and Epharia was faster than him and she’d already crawled out the window.

His whole body was shaking and he wasn’t sure it was in one piece, but Max followed her, shook matted hair out of his face in time to see bullets ripping up the sand behind her. Epharia, his inner half, the one he could not ever lose, she ran. She ran well and so fast that within moments she’d disappeared behind a dune. The War Boys didn’t chase her – why should they? He was the prize, with a boot on his neck and a crossbow cocked behind his head. 

Oh. He heard that. And no immediate broken bones started screaming. A lucky wreck, but then, he’d had a lot of practice. Max didn’t start growling until they hauled him to his feet, and he caught one across the nose with a bruised fist but there were _so many_ , and he was lucky he didn’t get an arrow in the chest for his trouble. Hell, the crossbow bolts were probably explosive too.

He’d been in the deep-desert a long time, where families were lucky to scrape together enough food and water to feed three people. There were easily twenty War Boys here, more people than he’d seen in one place for more than a hundred days. 

She ran. Fear and adrenaline and worse things, crazier things, were running through his head. Some of them were hers. Max stumbled along behind the creaking wreck of his car, eyes darting everywhere but unable to see her. The white-painted War Boys weren’t like any cult he’d seen before, all skeleton faces and pleased shouts, and it took him more than an hour to realize that none of them had daemons.

None of them had daemons.


	2. Chapter 2

The Wretched lived outside the borders of the Citadel, out in the sands where they could set down their lean-tos and chew over the bones of any foolish desert creatures that walked too close. Where the blood and the cruelty that emanated from the towers didn’t hang so thick in the air. It was into one such outcropping of humanity that Epharia wandered, her muscles stretched taut in sympathy with Max far above her. Every hair on her back burned with echoed pain, and her bones were leaden with fear. 

When one of the Wretched lunged at her, appearing out of nowhere from under the sand-colored cloth shading his back, her first reaction was to leap away, snarling. But she had no human by her side, no way for them to know she was daemon, not flesh and blood at all. She ducked a blow from something that might have been a rusted pipe and forced her mind into a higher gear. 

“Don’t you touch me!” The effort behind the words was enormous – Epharia felt like screaming rather than speaking. Far above, words bound back by a gag, Max was running for his life. And she could not help him. 

The Wretched man dropped his pipe with a shriek, his daemon a dusty short-haired terrier barking at his heels. 

“Don’t touch me.” Epharia repeated. 

“Wha–what–”  
She didn’t stay to answer questions. Epharia streaked away, through the rest of the hidden encampment, dodging children with bloated bellies and women with chunks of flesh missing where they’d gouged out tumors, and men with arms and legs missing, and daemons too weak to pick themselves up off the ground. Epharia ran over pits of rotting flesh and the dried-to-brittle leather of the shanties. She knocked over a dented water bowl, and for a moment the furious howling drowned out the clenched feeling in her lungs. (Up above, Max couldn’t breathe through the rubber across his face. Up above, he couldn’t even feel the searing burn of the brand on the back of his neck.)

But Epharia did. She left the Wretched behind and sheltered under the awnings of the Citadel itself. She crept close to the runoff pipes, where the liquid waste of the Citadel ran out across the sand and disappeared almost at once. She panted and shivered and whined in pain. “It’ll be alright, Max,” she growled the words out, relishing in the way they tasted in her mouth. It had been so long since they’d shared any. “I’ll get us out of this. We’ll survive this. We’ve survived worse.” 

She didn’t believe it. And he couldn’t hear her. 


	3. Getting on the Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ha its been a month since i updated. :( I am so sorry you guys! It's actually MUCH harder than I expected to write in-canon events. The story-telling is so efficient, it's hard for me to improve on it without actually just writing what happens. Which nobody wants. I am reserving the right to skip some scenes if the presence of daemons would not improve them. (so, mostly action. which is visual story telling anyway.)

Furiosa walked up the causeway with long, rolling steps, feeling the weight of the metal on her arm like a promise. The spiky adrenaline that caught her up last night was almost gone for now, hidden under the familiarity of the War Boy chants and the shimmer of the focusing mirrors on the Tower in front of her. She barely glanced at Slag and Fueler in the forward guard, though the lancer leaned back in his perch and tapped his forehead with a closed fist in salute.

A treacherous part of her whispered that she could still turn back, that if she turned out the Wives now they wouldn’t think she had been the one to hide them. Or if they did, no one would be able to prove it. Furiosa hauled herself up into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind her, gritting her teeth as she crushed that part of her into pieces. But the thought lingered.

She leaned out from under the roof as Joe gave his speech, her heart cold as night iron and her mind sharp as knives. _One day_ , she thought, _he will turn that water off too soon._ And no one would help the War Boys caught on the ground when the Wretched turned on Him.

Furiosa put her foot on the gas and started down the causeway, watching her crew peel out in front of her and feeling her hatred settle into a hard coal inside her chest. No time for second guesses, just quiet certainty and a hate that had burned in her so hot and so long that it had seared everything else away.

One way or another, she was never coming back to the Citadel.


	4. Reunion

She felt him coming over the sands. A streak of black and brown across the bright desert, the thrill as his wingtips brushed the tops of dunes. There was a warning shout from the War Boys on the Rig behind her, but only one or two shots got off before Ace called a halt. They couldn’t have hit Aurelio anyway, such a small target moving so quickly. Furiosa glanced out of the window just as her daemon came barreling through it, skidded to a halt on the dashboard and barely avoided ramming himself into the windshield.

They exchanged a long look, Aurelio ruffling his feathers and Furiosa feeling the edges of fear creep into her bones. His coming was the next step down a very long road. She took a deep breath, smelling the exhaust of the Rig and the hot leather of the seats and the sterile dust of the Wasteland. And then she turned the wheel.

The Rig growled under her as it left the smooth road, listening to the shouts of her crew up above, leaning into the gear shift as they turned. There was a track, of sorts, where Buzzard vehicles ran sometimes. The War Rig was bigger than anything they had, carved new paths through the packed sand, but she could follow the edges of the ‘road’ around the worst of the crags.

Ace appeared at her window, gnarled fingers wrapped around the edges of the door. “Boss, we’re not going to Gastown?” he asked, staring unabashedly at Aurelio, who glared back and snapped his beak threateningly in the old War Boy’s direction. When Furiosa only looked away, towards her daemon on the dashboard, Ace pressed, “Bullet Farm?”

She almost answered, then. Ace was her second, lead Boy on her crew. She should have been able to trust him with anything. But there were five women hidden in the hold, and Furiosa did not trust _herself_ with their safety, let alone her crew. They wouldn’t ever understand; they loved the Immortan too much.

So, “We’re heading east,” she said, felt the engine growl through her feet, and shifted up another gear.

Ace looked at her a moment too long, and Aurelio took a step or two closer, his claws clicking on the metal. “I’ll pass it down the line,” Ace said at last, and retreated to his post up on top of the Rig. Furiosa let out a quiet breath and took her human hand off the wheel so she could rub Aurelio’s head and neck.

“We keep moving,” Aurelio said, to quiet the chaos in her head.

Furiosa gave him a drawn smile, just a tightening of her lips, and put her hands back on the wheel.

 


	5. Pick the Bones

Furiosa had never put her crew’s trust to the test. Not really. She had led them into death and back again a hundred times, but it had always been under Joe’s orders. Now, knowing that they would have to die before the sun went down, she could barely even look at Ace. The hills rolled away beneath her wheels, and the colored smoke from the Immortan’s armada was visible in her rearview mirrors.

“What is this? Backup, decoy?”

Furiosa glanced up at her second, seeing the uneasy set of his jaw and the reflective black of his goggles. “It’s a detour.” She didn’t know how far she could push him, how many miles she could put between her and the Citadel before he started pushing back. But the armada in the near distance started that clock ticking a bit faster. Ace hadn’t asked about her daemon, though he knew what Aurelio was. The War Boy who was too old to be a War Boy, old enough to have seen the end of the world. Old enough that he must have lost his daemon in the Wars, and not at the cut of a great silver knife.

It was Aurelio who saw the shadows first. “Buzzards,” he hissed, tilting his head to the side so he could look up, past Ace, into the searing blue sky. Black and brown wings, almost like Aurelio’s but so much larger, dipped and turned above the Rig. Buzzards didn’t have long ranges, and they certainly didn’t have a witch’s ability to separate from their daemon. The popular theory at the Citadel was that the scavs who sent their daemons flying scout went mad from the constant pain of being too far away from their other half.

A second later, Furiosa caught the reflection of a mirror on the hill above. “Eyes right!”

The spiked cars came in from both sides, the long shadows of their daemons pressing in overhead. But even doing war, daemons were reluctant to cross human battles. And War Boys, daemonless, moving through the world stuffed full of emptiness, had the advantage.

“Should we turn around, run ‘em into our backup?” Ace was at her window, sensible as ever. If this had been a real raid, and the War Rig nothing but bait to draw out the Buzzards, the move would have made perfect sense. Against Joe’s full armada, the spiked scavs wouldn’t last a minute. But this wasn’t a raid, it was an escape.

“No, we’re good,” Furiosa said, her bubbling hatred peeling away under the threat of battle. “We fang it.”

There were three things Imperator Furiosa could not live without. She needed the weight of her metal arm like an anchor to hold her in place, so that she wouldn’t spin out of control. She needed Aurelio in her head like a whisper, telling her that she could survive this. After all, hadn’t they survived so much worse?

And she needed the thrill of a fight, the way her mind went razor sharp and still, expecting death. The way everything but the current moment faded away. Without this, she would have gone mad in the Citadel. It was out here, past the Fury Road, with nothing but the smell of burning guzz and blood, that she belonged.

Fueler’s vehicle went into the pit with that graceless quickness of momentum jerked to a sudden stop. Furiosa had about a second to jerk the Rig out of the way, her metal beast barreling down the road too fast for anything but a swaying turn. Ace, still clinging to her window, braced himself as the wheels brushed the edges of the pit. He climbed back up to check on the gunners as the hissing, buzzing sound of the saws on the ridged wheels of the War Rig cut through the noise of her engine. Furiosa took a deep breath, and then another, watching for more hidden chains on the road.

Aurelio was on the passenger seat, claws dug into the padded leather. “Stay close,” she told him, and the daemon laughed.

“You don’t have to ask me twice,” he gasped, crouched low with his wings half-spread. He’d never done war with her before. She’d never let him.

Crash’s vehicle swung wide in front of her, thunder up, to get at the Buzzards to her right. Behind her, Furiosa heard her bikers go down witnessed, and a mixture of guilt and relief wormed into her chest. Each Boy killed now was one less for her to deal with later. But this was _her_ crew, and she had spent a long time trying to keep them alive.

Then Ace was at her window again, the Buzzards harrying her sides. Furiosa felt each movement like a clean cut of a sharp knife: lock down the accelerator, pull crossbow from its holster, swing the door open and aim for the Buzzards’ grill. The moment of silence that followed an explosion.

It was different, to be on the run. War never stopped on Fury Road, it just came and went like sand dunes shifted by the wind. But Furiosa had always been contained by the Citadel, held back by an invisible leash that tied her down. Freedom bubbled in her blood now, heady as the fumes pouring off the flamethrower on the back of the Rig. All she had to do was get away. Even the Mother behind her, ramming through the wreckage of her own cars, was nothing more than a rock in the road. Furiosa watched the mirrors of her War Rig and said to Aurelio, “We’ll get through this. Just hold on.”

The hills around them sank back into the dirt, leaving the horizon wide and empty in front of her. The Mother was creeping up alongside, outpacing the weighted Rig and swinging her hydraulics around like the Buzzards of her drivers’ daemons, a long thin neck ready to pull out the eyes of her prey. Furiosa watched Gash’s vehicle swing around her nose again, looking for another Buzzard to blow up. She watched her rear guard crumple into pieces as the Mother rammed them, a War Boy flying across the hood of the Rig and falling gracelessly to the other side.

_Dead dead dead. Three less you have to kill._

But they had reinforcements. A few plucky Citadel cars had left the shelter of the armada and swung up to the Rig instead. Two cars and a bike; Furiosa counted them in her mirror. They’d get rid of the Buzzards if they could, but if these new cars had caught up with the Rig it didn’t bode well for her chances at out-running the Citadel forces.

Still, two cars and a bike. She could handle them. Or the Buzzards would.

Two cars, a bike, and a blood bag strapped to the hood of a vehicle. Furiosa looked down at him, and he looked up, and there was a strange moment of mutual disdain before the Buzzards rammed his little car. Furiosa put her eyes back on the road.

And then the hatch slid back, Angharad’s hair whirling around her in the wind. Furiosa could only see her out of the corner of her eye, but there was something in her gut that was tugged sideways at the unearthly sight, at Angharad’s yell. “We can’t breathe down there!”

“Stay out of sight!”

Aurelio called a warning as the saw came in, and Furiosa was forced to throw herself down across the seats to avoid the spinning blades. Sparks like stars burned and bounced off the metal in her arm. There was a pistol in her hand but no chance to use it. When had she drawn the gun? Furiosa couldn’t remember. Pinned down by the Buzzard blades, she couldn’t see what happened, only hear the explosions and feel the backwash of heat as the little pursuit vehicle took out the Buzzard Mother four times its size.

There was time for her to take a deep breath. And another. Angharad had retreated back into the hold, and the skies were empty of rat-winged buzzard daemons. Furiosa looked up, and saw the storm.

The first thing she felt was a fierce gladness. The clouds of dust and fallout and red lightning would hide her from the encroaching Armada, if she could just finish off these pursuit vehicles. More than that, the storm would pull War Boys off her back like wind stripping leaves from a tree branch. She would not have to kill them herself.

They would still be dead, her crew, but this was a safer way to get rid of them. Ten to one were still bad odds, even for her. “Furiosa…” Aurelio said, flattening his feathers. She glanced over at him, but her daemon stayed silent, and Ace swung down to her window in a sudden blur of motion.

“Why can’t you stop?”

Furiosa hunched her shoulders, nothing but instinct mimicking Aurelio’s defensive position, but Ace’s hand was suddenly at her throat and she thought, _only right that I kill him, and not the storm_ , and put her metal fist to his face.

She just had to get through the storm. If she could make it that far, she would have space to breathe again.

Her little eagle cried out when the flamers from the second vehicle came up on her right, and Furiosa slammed into them as hard as she could without losing momentum. She didn’t have time to check on Aurelio – the flare of burning was hot along her human arm and shoulder, but there was no light of fire in the cabin, just the stench of burning feathers.

Furiosa pulled her Imperator’s scarf up over her mouth and nose, settled old goggles across her eyes. She pulled the sunroof shut with a heave of her arm, and braced herself for the rush of the storm.


	6. After the Storm

There were footprints in the freshly turned sand.

The sound of silence echoed dully in Epharia's ears as she trotted steadily across the flats, clean dog-prints a spotted trail in the faded fire of the dirt. She wasn't tracking by sight or scent or sound – all of those had been made useless by the storm. And she might not be able to keep up with the War Party, but once she'd felt Max leave the Citadel she'd torn off after them, her tireless run eating up the miles. Having no need to eat or sleep almost made up for the roaring pace of the wheels she didn't have. Hampered only by his fever turning the edges of her mind to glistening glass and blood-loss making her steps light, Epharia skipped to a stop by the ruins of a car half-buried in sand, the windows blown out and the engine unsalvageable scrap twenty paces away.

She stopped to watch the ruin for a moment, panting with his echoes of uncomfortable heat and wary of War Boys, but there was no movement in the soft-spun sand. Epharia barked once, loudly, and Max burst from the dirt like he truly was one of their ghosts, chains ringing as he shook his head. The two eyed each other, Max shaking sand out of his muzzled face, pulling a wicked curved needle from his neck while Epharia stood splay-legged on the dune. He acknowledged her with a grunt and pulled his chain free of the wreckage, shaking the daemonless War Boy that came with it. Epharia had spent enough time being hunted by the human-less daemons of the Citadel to know what happened to War Pups when they earned their paint; she couldn't tell if this one was dead or not by the daemon that should have been curled up by his side.

Max seemed to think he was; her human pulled a shotgun from the wreckage and, with one check to make sure it was loaded, blew the Boy’s hand off. Or would have, if the gun hadn’t sparked, hissed with all the sand in it, and died. Epharia laid back her ears at the pulse of incomprehensible rage that ran through him; Max threw the gun aside and tore at the chain with clumsy human fingers, unable to bite at the offending hand because of the heavy steel on his face. 

Epharia barked again, turning his anger back on himself. They were dizzy with fever and blood loss, but that did _not_ mean he was allowed to tear apart a man, even a War Boy, with his bare teeth.

That was her job. 

Max turned to glare at her, then threw up both hands like he was giving up on the entire situation. His exasperation was the clearest sign of intelligence she’d seen from him so far, though, so Epharia wasn’t going to rebuke him for it. Instead she stalked forward, grimacing at the very idea of blood on her tongue, but then–

A sound. Not a _thump_ , precisely, nor a _whack_. More like a _clank_. Like someone beating the dust out of an engine that had just gone through a sandstorm. Max and Epharia exchanged looks.


	7. The Fight

He slung the War Boy, car door and all, over his shoulder, and she crept out into the sand to scout. 

The War Rig appeared like a mirage out of the desert, a hulking beast of a vehicle that emanated nothing but cold distaste. While she watched the engine growled to life, a comforting sound in the Wasteland silence, and above it Epharia heard voices. More than one, though she couldn’t make out any words. She didn’t risk walking out in front of the strangers - any movement could be met with a gunshot, and that did not go well with survival, generally speaking. She did peer around the corner however, trusting her fur to keep her camouflaged. 

Max nearly dropped the busted shotgun when he felt her shock. Epharia backed away from the edge of the Rig and glanced back at Max, still twenty feet behind her. Their ghosts shouted loud for a moment, loud enough to make him stop and shake his head to clear it. Loud enough for her to doubt what she had seen, because surely, _surely_ such a thing could not be real. 

And yet they were still there when she and Max stepped out into full view. Five women wrapped loosely in white, washing dust from shade-soft skin, their daemons bright and _laughing_. Epharia was so taken with the sight she almost – _almost –_ failed to notice the sixth, the one with black grease across her forehead like a long-forgotten thunder cloud, and whose eagle daemon saw them first. His shriek cut through the sound of water, of laughter, and was accompanied by Max dropping the car door with its tangle of War Boy to the ground. 

In the white haze that had covered the plains like gauze, the sound of water falling was as loud as an avalanche. Epharia panted, her eyes flickering between the shining coats of the white-swathed girls’ daemons and the singed feathers of the eagle on Rig, the slow menace that rolled off the one-armed Imperator like blood from a wound. 

“Water,” Max said, and it was the Wife who brought it to them, her belly swollen not with hunger but with life. It had been so long since Epharia had seen humans and daemons, not pulled tight from starvation but held with anger, that she almost could not tell which one of the five belonged to the pregnant Wife. 

And then the lioness snarled when Max snatched the hose from her, his hands steady on the trigger of the broken gun. Epharia watched her, the woman with the scars across her forehead and cheek, who stood with bare feet unflinching on the Wasteland sand. It was not that she forgot the real threat, the Imperator standing so still, having thrown away her wrench, and the eagle crouched on the hood of the Rig. It was that the Wife was so much closer, and it had been so long since Epharia had stood so close to so many human beings and not tried to kill them. Her mind was fuzzed; the droplets that hit her dust-covered fur were cold as metal, but the water Max swallowed down settled him, quieted some of the whispers and slowed the glass-glazed edges of their vision. 

It was not enough to bring him back to words. He dropped the hose by his feet, and Epharia was stupid enough to glance down at it, to see the War Boy’s face twitch and roll away. The fact of his survival made little impact on her; he was just another enemy, and he was still too weak to be a problem. 

“No. You.” 

Epharia glared up at the second Wife, who pulled fear into her skin but walked with boneless, heavy grace. Her fox daemon took two steps forward, like she was coming with her human, but Epharia put a stop to that with a snarling growl and a snap of her teeth. Bad enough to have three living humans close to her. She did not need the physical threat of a daemon next to her as well.

“Angharad, is that just the wind, or is that a furious vexation?”

And the golden Wife swung her head around, looking not at Max but _past_ him, into the depthless haze. Epharia turned her head to look as well, to see the dots of the Armada growing like metal weeds out of the horizon. 

The Imperator’s eagle attacked before she could so much as twist her ears to listen for his wings. 

It was blinding. Pain like burning ripped across her face; Epharia tried to howl but there was no breathe in her lungs from where Max had fallen. Her bites got her nothing but a mouthful of feathers, but she ripped them from skin and for a moment her vision was clear. 

And then she had to turn and snap her teeth at the lion and the badger, who had crept up behind her but flinched away when she bit at them. Epharia turned to help Max, tangled in his chain and barely avoiding the bone-crushing bolt cutters the Imperator swung with roars like a daemon’s. Then the vixen was at her left, nipping at her legs, and the lioness was on her back. 

Like Epharia had never fought daemons bigger than her before. She rolled with the lion’s momentum, taking the pain to the back of her neck as teeth sank in, so that she could rip herself free before the jaws could close. When Epharia snapped her teeth through the lion daemon’s tail, feeling golden Dust thick on her tongue, it was the pregnant Wife who screamed. 

That bought the dingo a moment, a breath. The War Boy was moving, scrambling in the sand with the rest of the humans, arms wrapped around the Imperator’s legs. Epharia leapt forward, so in tune with Max’s instincts – _get the gun_ – that she and he moved at the same moment. 

The eagle got there first. Wings were cheating. He slashed at Max’s hands with claws not meant to touch human skin, slowed her human half a second and then the Imperator was there, not big enough to pin Max to the Rig but quick enough to eject the magazine. Epharia crashed into the eagle at full speed, snapped her teeth shut on his leg and brought him down under the belly of the Rig, where he could not fly away. 

His wings really were troublesome, stinging her eyes and beating her already muddled head. The shot went off next to Max’s ear, and she flinched enough to let the eagle escape her teeth. As she chased him back out from under the Rig Epharia saw the Wives and their daemons occupied with the War Boy, trying to keep him pinned without letting their daemons touch him. Max had the Imperator held, for a moment, and she saw the eagle’s flight falter at his human’s lack of breath. 

But the chain snapped taut and Epharia yelped when Max fell flat and the little eagle turned to stoop on her again. She snapped her teeth and ducked her head, unable to catch him as securely as she had, and felt her own breath grow short when the chain wrapped around Max’s throat. 

The muzzle, strange and hideous though it was, protected his face as much as not, when her knee slammed into it, when the water hose raked across it wide enough to open it. Epharia felt the open stream of clean water spilling out onto the sand as keenly as she would have felt the loss of Max’s blood. But he rolled, and in the moment before three gunshots she felt his victory not as a joy but as a sudden _relief_. 

The little eagle fell to the ground as if stunned, folding his wings like a stone, crouching under Epharia’s teeth. She only panted, her lips lifted in a snarl, watching the lioness who was watching her. The Imperator lay as still as her daemon, in a position that Epharia knew from experience said surrender-not-defeat. And when Furiosa turned to look at the metal weeds still growing to the tune of that hideous guitar, Epharia felt Max’s fear come rushing back. 

_Escape escape escape._

“Glory me blood bag,” the War Boy said into the silence, oblivious. “You snagged yourself a daemon. How’d you do that?” 

“Bolt cutters,” Max forced the words out like they’d hurt him, though the fight had only left him a little out of breath. “Chain.” 

And the War Boy _jumped_ to do it, so quickly that Epharia almost leapt after him and Max held up a hand. “Hey, hey, _hey!”_ But the Boy was like a puppy, stumbling around too fast or too slow, eager to please. 

“Would you look at that?” he said, as if just noticing the Armada on the horizon. With reverence instead of fear. “So shiny. So chrome. We could ask for anything.I’m going to ask for a daemon, what d’you think?” 

One of the Wives flinched at that. The vixen crept away, back behind the shivering legs of two Wives huddled together. Epharia had no extra eyes to spare to watch them, too busy keeping one eye on the little eagle and the other on the Imperator as she stretched her long arm out slowly, cautious. 

Max pulled his jacket off the War Boy’s chest, and for half a moment Epharia felt something in her chest lurch into life. Something that had been long buried in the sand. 

“You can ask for more than a jacket.”

Epharia, standing up towards the cab of the Rig, saw the pregnant Wife walking with power in her feet, like she had before. Like she could not stop, or be stopped, a lioness stalking in her wake. “We’re going to the Green Place,” she said, like prophecy. 

And Max shot again, three bullets when he could have used one. None of them touched the daemon, but the Wife came to a stop, barely breathing. In Epharia’s experience, gunshots were often the thing that stopped prophecy. This would be no different. 

“We’re going to the Green Place of Many Mothers.” 

Max didn’t wait for Epharia to get in the cab, but she left the little eagle in the sand and raced his jacket onto the passenger seat. It was a little disorienting to be sitting on the right where the wheel ought to be, but Max just hauled himself up into the Rig and started that beastly engine. And for a moment, everything was all right. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know how Fury Road is almost entirely fight scenes and/or chase scenes? 
> 
> Yeah. I suck at those.


	8. The Negotiation

Furiosa caught up to her Rig in an easy lope, Aurelio leaving her side to soar up and away, back towards the armada, scouting. The Wives trailed behind, and she didn’t have time to notice but she did anyway, that none of them fell back, none of them so much as stumbled on the loose sand.

“This Rig goes nowhere without me,” she said, pulling her prosthetic off the side of the Rig. Within moments she was armed again, and the feral was sitting back with stubbornness written across his face. His daemon growled from the passenger seat when she hauled herself up face to face with him, but Furiosa only spared the dingo a wary glance before turning her attention on the blood bag.

“You’re relying on the gratitude of a very bad man,” she said, feeling Joe’s wrath on the back of her neck, not like a brand (That had been impersonal. Marking a thing as yours.) but like a vast and bloody knife.

 _Shred her_.

What was this scav after? Not power. Not the Immortan’s favor, despite what he said. He wanted to get away just as badly as she did, Furiosa saw it in the tightness of his jaw and the way he blinked as little as he could afford to. He just didn’t want the Wives along with him.

Furiosa could understand that. She just wouldn’t accept it.

It wasn’t the dull clink of the chain that prompted her offer. It wasn’t the scowl he wore under the metal. When she said, “You want that thing off your face?” with all the harsh impartiality of the Wasteland, she did not mean _do you want help?_

What she meant was _do you want freedom?_

_You want to stop being a thing? This is the first step._

And she didn’t know what he heard, looking back with hooded eyes and a silence that went deeper than instinct, that went down into whatever tattered scraps of humanity he had left. She’d seen ferals like this before around the Citadel. They didn’t last long, having forgotten was it was to be human. Their daemons were uncontrollable, wild. But this one only curled her lip when he opened the door, the gun Furiosa had hidden in the skulls of the Rig still clutched in his hand. Furiosa slid slowly into the driver’s seat, hands clearly visible, watching the dingo’s yellowed teeth.

“Let’s go,” she called down to the Wives, and braced herself for the run up ahead.


	9. Deescalation

“You want that thing off your face?”

Epharia whined before she could silence the sound, and Max glared at her with one eye. The other was watching the Imperator. She _looked_ earnest enough, but looks meant nothing in the Wasteland and less in the Citadel. Still, he could feel every grain of sand caught between skin and metal, sore and bleeding. And something more than that… there was an offer underneath her rush of words, an offer that went beyond taking the muzzle.

He didn’t have the brain space or the time to decode it. Max opened the door and Epharia ducked into the footwell, her fur bristling, when he slid into the passenger’s seat. The eagle didn’t join them, which he might have found more disturbing if he hadn’t spent the last however-many-days surrounded by daemonless War Boys. As it was, getting the Wives crowded into the backseat was far more of a production, and he found their easy familiarity with each other’s daemons far more unsettling than Furiosa’s witch-range. They were crowded tight together, pressed fur to skin, and it made his own storm-sore skin prickle with unease.

Epharia snarled when the Imperator reached down close to her and Max stilled them both, the gun still hovering too close to Furiosa, his voice Epharia’s reassurance. It had been a long time since he had talked to his daemon, even so indirectly. Even so wordlessly. He nudged her side with one leg, reaching down to take the second pistol from its holster by the gearshift, watching the Imperator’s slow movements, sharp eyes.

The golden Wife was bleeding, where one of his shots had winged her. Her daemon was bleeding too, from a bite in her tail, and Epharia had Dust on her teeth. The short-haired Wife’s words ran through him like needles, sharp and small and painful.

“Of all the legs you had to shoot, that one was attached to his favorite.”

He could not _listen_ without _caring_. It was hard to survive the Wasteland when the soul you shared with your daemon kept _caring_.

Max grabbed a bag from the white-haired one, whose vixen snarled back at him when her human hissed, “ _Smeg_.” He shook out white linen, cans of food, and something small and golden. The gold Wife snatched it off the floor of the Rig before it could tumble down next to Epharia, stared at Max with all the fearless rage of a War Boy, with all the burning intelligence of an Imperator. She passed the alethiometer to the youngest without looking away, though Max’s feral eyes kept flinching from hers.

He stared a moment at the golden compass without recognizing it. There were not so many truths left in the world that he knew what this one was. But it rang some bell in the back of his head, some memory he couldn’t quite reach, even as the white-haired Wife tucked it away in her wraps.

It didn’t matter. Max set the broken memory aside and focussed on filling the bag at Epharia’s feet. The first few guns were easy; in sight, in reach. He grabbed a shotgun from the seat behind him, ignoring the fact that the brown girl gathered both a badger _and_ a hare onto her lap away from his reaching fingers.

What unsettled him the most was that he _knew_ where all the guns would be without looking. It was where _he_ would have put guns, if he’d had the bullets to fill them and the time to equip a Rig like this. That, more than anything else, made him itch. This Imperator was _good_. Which was bad, because he still believed they’d have to kill one another. There were no true alliances in the Wasteland. Just survival.

She kept glancing at him, the oozing menace Epharia had felt fading away. He still saw _danger_ when he looked at Furiosa, but it was a cold, coiled thing, not an explosive rage. Max snapped his fingers at the Wives, unable to keep his attention on so many people _and_ form real sentences  _and_ keep his finger on the trigger without pulling it.

“You don’t have to do it just because he tells you to.”

“What choice does she have?”

“He’s not going to hurt us, he needs us.”

“Oh he’ll hurt us alright.”

Bitterness wound through the words like the poisonous water of the Gastown moat. Max tried not to listen; above all things short of his own survival, he did not want to hear their words. But it didn’t matter. The youngest, whose daemon was a tiny, trembling fruit bat clinging to her shoulder, passed him the gun without speaking, flinching when he grabbed it.

“Do you think he’s coming to the Green Place?”

Like he wasn’t right here, listening to them without wanting to.

“Never,” the white-haired Wife hissed. “He’s just a crazy smeg who eats _schlanger_.”

Max didn’t blink at the sudden venom in her voice. It was not, he thought, truly meant for him.


	10. Counting the Cost

Capable pressed the heel of her hand against the bandages on Angharad’s leg, remembering all the times Joe had called her hair bloody. Keeping her breathing calm, her heart from bursting free of her chest.

 _Out of the Vault_ , it kept beating. _Out of the Vault._

That hidden room had been a hellhole, all of them crammed together and listening to the War Boys’ shouts and feeling the scalding heat of the Wasteland press in around them. There was no air, in that hold, just the frightened eyes of her fellow Wives and Pheona’s shivers against her side. Caelai in her lap, running her teeth and tongue along the vixen’s shoulder to calm them both down.

When Angharad had moved forward, said she was going to talk to Furiosa, everyone in the hold had argued. “It’s not _safe_ ,” Toast said.

“We need air!” Angharad had to shout it over an explosion. Cheedo flinched, Jiemba chittering from his perch in the darkest corner of the tiny room. The Dag wrapped her arms around the youngest Wife, her expression an equal mixture of anger and fear. “Let me out, Adara.”

The lioness was standing in front of the hatch, her ears laid back, her feet spread apart as the Rig below them swerved back and forth over loose sand. “Don’t get shot,” the daemon growled.

“I’ll be out for just a second,” Angharad reassured them, smiling at Capable and holding Toast’s hand. “I’ll be alright.”

Now, Capable sat with Angharad’s blood on the palm of her hand. Now, they sat in the cab of the War Rig, riding through a white haze of a sky, listening to the insistent rasp of the file and the roar of the engines.

Now, she watched the feral point that gun at her, at Angharad, at the women she loved, and she could muster nothing more than rage – the kind that held purpose and meaning in it, not the powerless screaming of the Vault. Capable sat with one hand on Caelai’s back and one hand on Angharad’s thigh, and thought to herself, _I will not let this man take freedom from us._

The rasp stopped only when the mountains emerged from the haze. They did not grow so much as suddenly appear, cliffs of ochre stone that extended endlessly in both directions. And the canyon in front of them, beckoning.

“Uh-uh, stay out of there,” the feral reached out to grab the wheel, his words matter-of-fact. Calmer. He was still wild though – when Furiosa’s eyes caught something behind him he only grabbed a fist full of Toast’s wraps and pulled her forward. Put a gun to her face.

“Don’t damage the goods,” she told him flatly, and Tarl nibbled reassuringly at her fingers. Capable left a smear of blood on the scope she pulled from the pile of things the feral, not quite Wretched, had dumped out of their bag. She leaned over Toast’s back, tried to press reassurance along her sister’s spine, and focused her glass eye on the black specs Furiosa had seen coming over the horizon.

“What do you see?”

Furiosa was the essence of stillness, of calm. Capable envied that, in the face of death, Furiosa only looked and looked and curled her lip. It had been a long time since Capable had seen the Gastown boys as anything more than ants under the windows of the Vault. She put the scope to her eye and felt Angharad follow her out to the window – felt her lioness press against Capable’s legs because there was so little room – to the rigs running towards them over the Wasteland in a black mass.

“Big rigs,” she listed out, her daemon twitching her hare’s ears in appreciation for how quietly she spoke. “Pole cats. Flamers. And there’s the People Eater himself.” Capable was almost proud of how her voice did not break in fear, or hitch, but only curled up in hatred for that fat old man and his rotting face. “Coming to count the cost.”

The feral only grunted, let Toast go and leaned back into his corner. His daemon put her paws up on the seat so she could watch them better, her legs all wire and bone. Capable, leaning back with a hand on Toast’s shoulder and one hand on the back of his seat, could almost feel the sharp edges of her anger smoothing away, sharpening into something more like understanding.

And then the Rig shook, a bone-rattling feeling that Capable’s guts understood like the shaking of a metal bed frame. There was acid in her mouth, the chalky smell of Him – she swallowed it, turning instead to Cheedo’s frightened squeak with a comforting touch and a look. Furiosa made a wordless sound, lower than the eagle’s scream but just as angry, and stretched herself out of the window to see where her daemon had gone.

“We’re dragging something out back,” she said, and still there was no emotion in her voice but Furiosa had been in the Vault too long. Capable knew the jagged movements of the Imperator’s hand and the way she clenched her jaw said _fear_ as much as _anger_. The Rig was not the fastest vehicle in the Armada, as the feral could prove. They could not afford to slow down. But when the wheel was tied and Furiosa was leaving ( _leaving,_ and only their daemons left between them and that feral) he volunteered to go.

He didn’t hesitate to haul himself up out of the Rig, taking their bag full of guns with him. Furiosa watched with calculating eyes flicking between him and his daemon, but the dingo only lifted her lip and snorted and did not move. Angharad shifted first, out of the pile of Wives in the back seat. Slid herself forward and into the space the feral had occupied, hushing his daemon’s startled snarl. The golden Wife sat with her feet curled under her, staring down at the daemon with her scars and her hair still flung about by the wind. And the daemon quieted. Furiosa put her hand on the gearshift but didn’t move it, only ran her thumb along the knob of bone and watched the dingo for another second before turning her attention back to the canyon.

It was the War Boy. The one from before, who’d come back to life by water at the side of the Rig. He sprang from the hatch as quick as Caelai, all scar and muscle and dead white paint, and wrapped his chain around Furiosa’s throat. He was screaming things, regurgitated lies and half-eaten truths. Capable had thought she would freeze, if one of Joe’s creatures made for war came for her. But she reached out with anger like claws and pulled him back. Caelai and Pheona shimmied away, desperate to escape contact with his peeling white skin, while Angharad lunged, careless of the snapping dingo at her feet.

They got him away, but Furiosa didn’t even pause to get her breath back before she had a knife at the Boy’s throat. Capable hadn’t even seen her draw it. A tangled clump of hair fell in her eye, and for a moment she wondered if their Imperator had already cut his throat. But Angharad had a hand on Furiosa’s arm, her voice hard as the spikes on the Rig.

“No unnecessary killing!”

“This War Boy wants me dead!”

“We agreed! He’s kamikrazee.” Angharad pulled Furiosa off, back into her seat. “He’s just a kid at the end of his half-life,” she said, furious and tired and breathing hard.

“No!” the War Boy shouted, and it took three of them to press him back against the cracked leather of the seat. “I live, I die, I live again!” There was more desperation than faith in his words. Capable felt her own ferocity give way to something more like pity.

“Look how slick He’s fooled you, War Boy,” Toast said grimly.

“Tie him up!”

“Throw him out!” Furiosa snapped, sliding her bone-handled knife back into the gearshift.

“Chuck him out,” the Dag agreed, squirming away from where she’d been forced to pull the Boy back towards herself.

They used Capable’s wrap, spread thin, to wrap his hands together. He was shouting still, and after Angharad had spoken Capable could see how young he was. Lumps already forming on the side of his neck that gave away his half-life status, lips so deeply cracked they could have been scars. The red irritated skin where he’d drawn something in blood on his chest, ages ago maybe. Maybe someone else had drawn it there. Capable had watched Angharad press knives and broken glass and pots into her skin for a thousand days it seemed, but she couldn’t understand why pain would be better than wholeness.

“You’ve got more friends.”

Capable was too busy keeping the War Boy pinned, but she heard the feral, saw him climb into the Rig out of the corner of her eye.

“They’re coming from the Bullet Farm.”

The Dag shifted so that the War Boy wasn’t lying across her lap, trying to keep his feet clear of Adara’s bulk in the footwell of the Rig, and the Boy laughed like he was trying to mimic Ilaria. For all Capable knew, he could be.

“It’s over,” he said, spitting the words out like bullet. “You can’t defy him.”

“Watch us, mate,” the Dag said, pressing a booted foot down on his chest.

“He’s nothing but a lying old man,” Capable hissed through gritted teeth, pretending that the closeness of her fellow Wives and the weight of this War Boy wasn’t making her heart shake.

“By his hand we’ll be lifted up!”

“That’s why we have his logo seared on our backs,” Angharad was as loud as her lion, flinging open the door behind him so that there was nothing between the wheels and sand but sound and empty air. “Breeding stock, battle fodder.” She was screaming, the weight of Joe’s Citadel crushing her lungs, and all the Boy could do was hear the war drums, the Doof’s guitar.

“No,” The Boy said, deaf and blind and dying. “I am awaited!”

“You’re an old man’s battle fodder!” Capable said, feeling for the first time the truth of it. She had trusted Angharad, of course, and believed what she said as Angharad had puzzled through what she meant when she said the Citadel was evil. But it was different to say the words to a War Boy and know that they were true.

“We’re not to blame,” he said, but he was only trying to convince himself.

“Then who killed the world?” Angharad demanded. And threw him from the Rig.


	11. Safe Passage

The stone walls of the canyon closed in around her like enemy cars, blinding, suffocating. Furiosa shifted down and glanced back into the cab of the Rig. None of the Wives had been hurt – Joe must have told his Boys not to touch them. Not until He had them back.

“I made a deal up ahead.” She wasn’t only speaking to them; the feral was watching everything with his strange, flickering blue eyes. Despite the pistols he held in each hand, there was more curiosity in him now than fear. The fear he left to his daemon, bristling at his feet. “I don’t know if it’s still any good.”

The Wives climbed back down into the hold when she asked it of them, going slow but without question. The daemons went one by one; the bat hidden in Cheedo’s wraps, the vixen curled around her human’s neck, and Toast’s badger jumping down into the passage himself, grumbling. Furiosa kept one ear open, in case something else decided to go wrong with the Rig, but she kept her eyes forward, to the Road and the feral in her passenger seat.

“I need you here,” she said to him, to distract him from watching his hostages get away. It wasn’t even a lie when she told it to him; she had severely underestimated the size of the War Parties to the Rock Riders. But then, when she’d made the deal with them, she had planned on being alone now. “You may have to drive the Rig.”

He just looked at her for a long moment; his eyes flicked towards her and then up to the road ahead, grip shifting on the pistols. It was a risk, asking anything of a human like him, but this whole plan stank of risks and luck and second chances. Furiosa turned the wheel to avoid a pile of rocks from an ancient landslide (Rider-made or not, she couldn’t tell) and let the offer sit.

Capable was just vanishing into the hatch with her daemon in her arms when he snapped back at Angharad, “You stay. You. Stay there.”

Furiosa felt something like anger flare up through her chest and into her arms, tingling in a hand that didn’t exist. But she had not survived so many thousand days as an Imperator just to lose her temper at some feral’s poor attempt to regain control. Angharad sat back with the pistol in her face, her expression less hidden than Furiosa’s but no less angry.

“Whatever you do you can’t be seen,” Furiosa let the engine roar through her instead of her anger, and her voice didn’t so much as tremble. The feral looked suspicious, unconvinced, and she pressed him.“I’m supposed to be alone. That’s the deal.”

He looked down at his daemon, who shook her head twice, and then surged into motion. In a second he was over the seat and down into the hatch, his elbows braced on the edges of the metal door and deadly close to Angharad’s lion, who snarled in surprise. The feral barely twitched, a gun in the lioness’s teeth, and his daemon snarled back from her place in the footwell.

“Down here.” He beckoned to Angharad, who stared down at him, her scars twisting into disgust. But she went without trembling, her hands heavy on Adara’s back and shoulders. There was no space for two humans, not really; and despite the danger Furiosa turned to make sure Angharad would be alright. Or if not alright, at least alive. The feral had squeezed himself back as far as he could, one pistol pointed at Adara and the other held down by Angharad’s belly.

If he had been a War Boy, he would have spread his legs and arms and taken up as much room as possible; if he had been an Imperator he would have already killed at least one of them. But Furiosa turned her head back to the road, puzzling out the idea that he looked just as scared as Angharad, to be so close to another human being.


	12. Fool

Even if the Wife was as scared and stiff as he was (and she was – frozen in place and barely breathing) Max knew that she’d take up most of the space in their hole. For one thing, no matter how much she hated him, her belly would keep getting in the way, and for another having a daemon as large as hers meant her personality, at least, was just as big. Epharia scrambled over them into the other half of Rig, snapping idly at the lioness just to keep her off Epharia’s back. “There,” she whispered, and Max felt his whole body twitch without telling it to. “Now we’re hidden.”

And now he couldn’t see a thing. Max made himself sink lower into the hole, telling himself that the weight of metal against his back and sides was a shield, not a prison. That the Wife wasn’t going to put her fist through his skull, that her lioness wouldn’t touch Epharia while he held a gun to her human’s vein.

“Hey,” the Imperator’s voice called him out of his thoughts, a little, and Max found that he could look at her without flinching. There was something familiar about her, and authority and a calm that reminded him of someone he couldn’t remember. Or someone he had chosen to forget. “What’s your name?”

He only hesitated for a moment, but she asked again, “What do I call you?”

This was the Wasteland; only dead people knew his name. And despite himself and everything he had been ground down into, he didn’t want these women to be dead. So he stayed silent, and Epharia said, “Does it matter?” and the Imperator looked at them with something almost like sympathy, if Max could bring himself to believe in the emotion.

“Fine,” she said, and he must have imagined the sympathy, because there was nothing in her voice now. Only survival. “When I yell Fool, you drive out of here as fast as you can.”

Epharia snorted. Max watched, feeling something in his mind sinking, spreading, as Furiosa’s human hand danced through the sequence. His vision still shook a little, from blood loss, and by now he was almost inured to the dry scratching thirst at the back off is throat, so it wasn’t anything _real_ that changed. It was something in his head that settled; if he wanted, he could leave the moment she stepped out of the cab.

Having given him the possibility, though, Furiosa had ensured that he wouldn’t take it. If he did, he would not be Max, and his daemon would not have been Epharia. It was impossible; already, he cared too much. He still flinched when the rocks clanged against the back of the Rig, and he still had a his pistol pointed at the Wife’s leg. But his finger wasn’t on the trigger, and instead of aiming the other at her daemon he put the safety on.

If these women were going to be his allies, he didn’t want to shoot them. Not by accident, anyway.


	13. In the Canyon

Adara was crouched by her head, fangs gleaming in the shadows of the Rig. Her tail kept twitching; small, aborted movements that stemmed from their rage and their fear. The man, the one who’d worn a muzzle and who still reeked of old blood under the dry scent of the desert, had one pistol pressed along her thigh, a cold bite of metal but better than the stripe of fire on her calf. He didn’t seem at all worried about the daemon who watched him with hungry amber eyes, perhaps knowing that his dingo, small and dusty though she was, could match the lioness.

Angharad was having trouble breathing, but she couldn’t tell if it was the baby pressing against her lungs, the stench of the Rig’s engines in her nose, or the anxiety that pounded through her skin, winding her muscles tighter than a spring. They’d come so far…

Furiosa’s voice rang indistinctly over the rocks, echoing off the metal tanker. And even if she couldn’t make out the words Angharad took that voice into herself, replaced a little bit of her nerves with the Imperator’s confidence and calm. She didn’t dare let herself hope, not yet, but she had written her words on the Vault walls and she had taken her sisters to freedom and she _would not go back to be a thing_. No man, more than Wretched but less than War Boy, would stand between her and the Green Place.

She told herself that, but the pistol was still pressed against her leg, and the thing in her womb gave a violent shove, so that she doubled over.

 _Whatever you do you can’t be seen. I’m supposed to be alone_.

Angharad put her hands over her mouth to stifle the noise, but she _hurt_ and it wasn’t her doing the hurting. The baby kicked again, and the feral backed away from her even further, if that was possible. The air left her lungs with a groan. Adara made a quiet mewing sound that Angharad hadn’t heard since before she’d settled. This was her nightmare – Joe had planted something of his poison in her, and now it was putting everyone in danger. Angharad curled her knees into her chest, bumping them against the low ceiling of the hole, and the moment she breathed in the thing kicked again.

She hadn't been able to hear what Furiosa had shouted to the cliffs, the impatient Rock Riders, but she heard the Imperator yell, “FOOL!”

She’d never seen someone move so fast. Before Adara could so much as growl, the man was up out of their hiding hole, into the driver’s seat and the Rig was roaring louder than any daemon. Angharad was frozen for half a second longer, but then she was climbing out after him, listening to the Rock Riders howl and flinching when the explosion behind them sent more echoes crashing through her bones. Adara, pressed against her legs, roared in answer.

The dingo leapt back into her place at the front of the cab, suddenly careless of Adara and her human. Angharad looked back, through the dust-smeared window, but she couldn’t see Furiosa, only the dead cars in the pass behind them. Had she made it at all?

And then the Imperator’s daemon swept through the window, the one Angharad had never met. He came up on the feral’s side, and the man jerked away when the eagle dove past him into the Rig. “We won’t outrun them,” the daemon said, puffing his feathers up when the dingo growled at him. “And that was the Armada behind us.”

Furiosa came up through the hatch, a little dustier than before but whole. Whole. She barely glanced at Angharad before climbing into the passenger seat, and the feral passed her a rifle like it was nothing but a toy. No, that was wrong: he handled the weapon like it meant death, but he gave it to Furiosa without a moment of hesitation, and they looked at each other for a moment too long; wild dogs sizing each other up for a fight.

Toast followed Furiosa, and then the rest of her sisters. Angharad didn’t say it, but her heart unwound a notch when they were back with her, a massed presence of white linen and furious women. It was only fanciful illogic to think she was safer with them, but that was how it felt.

The Riders came out of the mountains, their daemons inhumanly fast behind them – rams, pumas, and long-tailed snow leopards with hair the color of red dust. Furiosa’s eagle screamed and threw himself out after them, careless of the bullets that whipped towards the Rig and the firebombs that splattered the hood in front of them. Furiosa didn’t even look after him, only watched the Riders coming in while the feral in the driver’s seat loaded his pistol. Had he lost the other one?

The Rock Riders screamed when they attacked. Even over the roar of flames, and engines, and the rev of the motorcycles Angharad could hear it. They screamed like they were dying. Maybe it was because when they did die (she saw them dying, Furiosa’s bullets knocking them over like tin cans) there was no sound at all.

And as if in response, the thing in her belly kept kicking, even with Capable’s hand on her thigh, even with Cheedo’s shoulder pressed up against hers. Angharad gritted her teeth and opened her mouth to scream, though screaming had never helped before. She held too tightly to Capable’s hand as the dust cloud washed over them, and Furiosa thrust the rifle into her hands like she would know what to do with it. Like she trusted Angharad to know what the springs and pieces and bolts did when taken apart. Toast grabbed it from her instead, and Angharad looked at her sister, Adara shrinking back in shame and anger.

When she had been Wretched, none of them had been rich enough to have a gun that worked. When she was a Wife, they had been used only to threaten her. Now she was free, but she was as useless as the baby she carried. Angharad sighed, a soundless escape of breath that was punctuated by another kick from the baby.

“Gun!” Furiosa held out her hands, and Toast fumbled with the casings. “Give me the gun!”

“It’s not loaded yet!”

Angharad didn’t even have to turn to hear the Rider shouting, to hear the thunder of rams’ hooves on the Rig behind them. _We had a deal!_

The feral turned and put a bullet in the Rider’s head. Angharad flinched away too late, barely avoiding the glass raining in. She could feel the pieces of window score against her back. Furiosa had been right to ask the fool to drive, and Angharad could barely stomach the thought. He moved like her. Furious, and deadly, and dead. They fought like one creature, many-limbed and roaring. 

Then, somehow, it was Joe himself behind them, and Rictus with his child’s daemon. Another one of her nightmares. Angharad forced herself to look at them, only to hear an Imperator shouting, “The Wives! No more flame!”

_Oh_. Joe still thought they would go back to him, crawl back on all fours with their daemons rolling over to show their bellies. Angharad pulled herself forward, over Tarl’s back. “Hold onto me,” she told Capable, without explanation, and threw herself half out of the Rig. 

Toast’s hand curled into the wraps around her legs. Capable’s arm circled her waist, and there were handholds in the Rig to support a shooter leaning out too far. Joe was there, close enough to see each rotted patch of skin under his gap-toothed mask. Backlit by the throne of the driver’s seat – a neat judgement on everything he had pretended to be. 

“Splendid!” he called to her like a pet. “Splendid! That’s my child. My property!” 

_It never was._

Adara dug her teeth into the knotted linen at Angharad’s back as Furiosa leaned back and laid her arm across Angharad’s, shooting back at Him like Joe was nothing more than another Rock Rider. Just another body. It was an Imperator who slid off the Bigfoot instead, but Joe dropped back away from Furiosa’s steady aim and Angharad let herself be pulled back into the cab. 

During that chase out of the canyon, Angharad for the first time understood how a man like Joe could have built himself into an Immortan. He drove like a demon, skills he surely hadn’t used since the establishment of the Citadel. He used his Imperators like so much flesh, and though it was Rictus who landed the shot that pinned their wheel to the door, it was Joe’s blood still kicking in her belly. 

“Bolt cutters,” Caelai said urgently, “The Dag’s bolt cutters.” 

It was Angharad who grabbed them out of the pile of things their feral had left on the floor of the Rig. It was Angharad who opened the door on the other side of the cab and leaned out, Capable still holding her together, to cut the chain between them and Joe. 

“Look out!” 

It was Toast and Tarl who screamed like one being, though the daemon could not have seen the rocks looming up in front of them, the Wasteland’s reminder of how fragile humans were, compared to It. 

“Angharad!” She turned, despite herself, when Joe used her name. It cost her precious seconds, but she did it anyway. “Get out!” 

The rocks smashed into the side of the Rig, a scream of metal and a thunder of stone. Angharad, both hands wrapped around the bit of chain meant for the Rig’s crew doing war, let her feet dance across the burning metal of the cab, back out towards the scarred door and the Dag’s reaching hands. 

Their feral was looking back at her, too much fear on his face for strangers he’d been trying to kill an hour ago. Angharad smiled, feeling freedom in her feet and her hands. For the first time it was real; she had made her own cause out of bolt cutters and broken chains. She reached out to grab the window of the door.

She slipped.

The door came with her, broken by the rocks that hadn’t hit her. The Wasteland’s own joke, the one it told over and over. 

The Dag was reaching out for her, Capable was leaning too far forward. There was no door to brace herself against. 

Adara, foolish, golden, leapt after her. 


	14. World of the Dead

She reached out after Angharad, just like she’d reached over to try and pry the harpoon away from the Fool’s hand; knowing it was impossible, but moving anyway. Angharad had a way of inspiring that in people.

“Stop! Turn the Rig around,” Capable said, furious, grieving. She shook the Fool’s jacket like he hadn’t just been pointing a gun at them. “Tell him to turn the Rig around,” she demanded of Furiosa. “Go back for her!”

“No.” The feral shook his head, just a little, his teeth clenched. He was like Furiosa – he knew the cost of living in the Wasteland. _We do our best to live in Angharad’s world. But you still live in Furiosa’s world, and let her do war because she knows it._

While Capable was shouting, Furiosa found she couldn’t draw enough air into her lungs. “Did you see it?” she asked, and she wasn’t even sure if he would answer honestly. If he had been nothing but a feral, he would have said whatever it took to preserve his own skin. But he had not left her in the canyon, and he had passed her the rifle with only a look. And his daemon was crouched at her feet, having been silent the whole battle, as still as Furiosa had ever seen.

“She went under the wheels.” He sounded calmer than she’d ever heard him. Like death was the only world he’d lived in, and now that it was back he could speak and hear and think again.

Until this moment, Furiosa would have said the same thing about herself. Until now, when she could hear how broken her own voice was. How desperate for a world with Angharad in it. “Did you see it?”

The Fool turned to look at her, really look at her. It was that look, and not the battle that had come before, that blew away the last of her doubts about this enemy-turned-ally. There was truth in his face, dust-streaked and tanned and almost compassionate, if Furiosa had believed in that sort of thing. “She went under the wheels.”

Furiosa found herself falling, falling. But she was only in the Rig, passenger on her own vehicle. Her hands opened and closed. Both of them. The sound of metal on metal was disquieting, wrong. For the first time in a thousand days. Angharad was –

“We keep moving,” she told the Wives, because they had lived in a different world. In the Vault, death came only after birth, and for Angharad there would be no birth. No freedom. When it was all that she had ever needed.

“No! No!” Capable had never been truly angry in all the days Furiosa had spent in the Vault with them. She had been sullen, scared, and viciously annoyed, but never angry. Now she slammed her fist against the back of Furiosa’s seat and fell back into the bench of the cab, her sobs turning into screams and back again. The others were just as devastated – Toast was frozen, staring at nothing.

“Whatever happens we’re going to the Green Place,” she said, with all the stubbornness of her daemon in her voice.

“This stupid Green Place, we don’t even know how to find it.” Cheedo had her hands over her face, had to shout to pitch her words over Capable’s crying. Of all of them, she was the one who had known both the most and the least. Furiosa had no space left for them in her chest; everything had been hollowed out by a gold-haired Wife with a shard of iron in her hand.


	15. Golden Death

They limped out of the canyon broken. Capable’s sobs subsided into shuddering silence; Toast put a careful hand on the redhead’s back, a distant comfort. Cheedo let her hands fall to her lap, empty. She had seen this, hadn’t she? The very last time she read the alethiometer. Jiemba no longer trembled in her hair, but curled against her shoulder as if dead. She should have paid more attention to the golden compass – if she had she could have _warned_ Angharad. Could have saved her.

The heat of the evening sun beat in on them through windows of broken glass, viscous and terrible. Cheedo could not remember a time the sun had felt so evil on her skin. She let her eyes fall shut, feeling the weight of tears on her cheeks, the sand in her eyes. _This_ was the world Angharad had fought to be a part of? _This_ was what she had been willing to die for?

She had died, and Cheedo found herself no longer willing.

When the something in their engine cracked and the Rig shuddered (nothing like the terrible shaking of the rocks, but a lurching half-life cough) she slipped down out of the doorless side of the cab, Jiemba clinging to the wraps around her shoulder. She stepped over Pheona’s silent circle, put her hands on either side of the Dag’s hunched shoulders. Cheedo looked at her and paused. It was no more than a moment, just a stop in momentum, but she did pause.

The Dag stared back at her with bloodshot eyes. She had been closer to the falling Angharad, but it had not been enough to catch her. Cheedo hesitated just long enough for the Dag to open her mouth, ready to ask a question, but Cheedo only let her fingertips brush the silver Wife’s cheek as she fell to the ground, took the shock in her bones, as painful as the sun but inside her skin.

Furiosa was fetching water for the engine. She barely glanced at Cheedo, but Joe’s youngest Wife saw the old tears on Furiosa’s face. The brittle way she moved. Angharad had been all that held them together. Cheedo pulled her wrap tighter around herself, a thin white shield, and felt Jiemba rearrange himself against her shoulder. “What are you doing?” he asked, so softly.

“I–“ She didn’t think she had an answer for him. And then, shivering despite the heat boiling off of the metal Rig, she found she did. “If Angharad didn’t make it to her Green Place, none of us will,” Cheedo whispered, moving further down the belly of the beast. She glanced back to make sure none of them heard her. Capable and the Dag were climbing down from the Rig as well, but Cheedo did not see grief turning to fear in their shoulders or the antics of their daemons.

When a shadow passed over her it was her, and not Jiemba, who flinched. It was only Furiosa’s daemon, who settled on the edge of the engine and flipped his wings like he hadn’t just flown miles from his human. Like he was any other daemon. Cheedo reached a hand up to run her fingers along Jiemba’s soft back and kept whispering.

“I don’t want to die, little bat.”

“Of course not,” Jiemba licked her palm in an attempt to reassure. “Of course you don’t want to die.”

Cheedo had reached the end of the Rig. Behind them were the foothills of the canyon range, the Armada. Joe.

Afterwards, back in the cab, Cheedo wasn’t sure if she had made the decision or if the decision had reached up out of her mind and grabbed her body whole. She remembered only that she was running across the burning sand, back in the direction they’d come. Their tracks were a deep rut in the sand, leading the Armada on. Even Furiosa could not run forever, and Cheedo was so tired of the sun.

“Cheedo, no!”

Capable.

“Cheedo don’t be _stupid_!”

The Dag. Why was the Dag’s insult so much easier to bear than Capable’s clinging concern? It didn’t matter, anymore.

“He’ll forgive us, I know He will!” she called back to her sisters. Why couldn’t everything just go back to the way it was? Miss Giddy telling a story, Angharad hanging on every word. Toast and Tarl up in the loft pretending not to listen while Capable braided Cheedo’s hair and the Dag practiced her handwriting on the chalkboard.

“There is no going back!”

“We were his treasures. He gave us the high life, what’s so wrong with that?”

They would catch her. Already Caelai was at her heels, and Pheona was in front of her. Cheedo saw the riders come up out of the dust in front of her, and she thought she would throw up from the mixture of relief and terror she felt at seeing them.

“We are _not things_!” It was only Capable who shouted. Cheedo resisted the urge to look behind her, to see if the Dag was chasing her still. It didn’t matter, anymore.

She didn’t turn even when she heard the gunshot, though Jiemba screamed his silent, too-high scream when he saw the riders go down. War Boys, just like the one that’d been in the Rig. From here you couldn’t even see that there was blood in them still.

Capable caught her first, leathered hand against her shoulder. The Dag was at her other side, where Jiemba sat, trying to hold onto her without touching him. “We are not things,” Capable said the words like a war cry, but Cheedo didn’t believe in war cries anymore. Angharad had screamed and roared, and look where she was now.

“I don’t want to hear that again,” she said, shaking her head as if to dislodge the insiduous truth.

“They were her words.” Of course it would be Capable who clung to those words the most – they were all she had left.

Cheedo was not interested in clinging to someone who, when she could bear to think of her at all, was always falling. “I don’t want to hear that again!”

The Dag grabbed both her arms this time, Pheona standing tall in the tire-rut the Rig had left. “Wring your hands,” she said, shaking Cheedo a little. “Tear your hair, but you’re not going back. You’re not going back to him!”

It wasn’t _Joe_ she wanted to go back to. Cheedo pretended it was not a sob that tore Angharad’s name from her lungs, that it was only fear that tore her out of the Dag’s arms. She would be safe with Joe, she knew she would. But she let the Dag gather her up anyway, let Capable put a hand around her waist. The walk back to the Rig seemed to stretch on too long. She could not look at Furiosa, or Toast, who watched her climb back into the cab without a word. The Dag followed her up, laid a pale hand over Cheedo’s, and said nothing. Half-hidden under the seat in front of them, the golden needles of the alethiometer danced.


	16. Back in the Saddle

The earth was red under their wheels. Toast stared out the window, watching the flatness of the horizon, wondering if her clan had ever come this way. Even if they had, everything looked different from the cab of the Rig. Smaller. Her people had never had power like this.

Their makeshift wheel trembled under the strain of holding the Rig straight, and Toast couldn’t help but watch it with a cautious eye. If that wrench gave way… but there were no rocks out here, to crash against. There would have been plenty of time to save her.

Into the numb silence that had descended after Cheedo’s mad run, that Fool spoke up. He sounded almost reasonable, quiet and curious. Tarl picked his head up off Toast’s arm and flicked his ears in the driver’s direction. Maybe he was worth more than he looked, wrapping the cleanest bit of cloth they could find around his crushed hand. "So where is this. This Green Place?"

Furiosa’s answer was short, simple. Spoken like there was no distance between fact and suspicion, though she had told the Wives that she had only ever taken this road in her mind. "A long day's run, heading east." Her daemon perched on the dashboard of the Rig, his creamy feathers stirring every now and then with a stray wind from outside. He was smaller than Toast had expected; barely larger than Capable’s hare, with a tiny beak and hooked talons like broken links of black chain. Furiosa heaved the talk away from the Green Place with her iron practicality. “We need inventory. I want you to match every gun with its bullets.” She handed the bag to Cheedo, who was easiest to reach, but the youngest only wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees and looked away.

As she had with the rifle, Toast accepted the task without a word. How could she say she resented the burden her fellow Wives put on the team? It was not their fault they had never called shots of their own, or emptied pistols into War Boys’ skulls. Toast took the smooth metal of a tiny revolver in her hand and weighed it, not sure what she was measuring.

“We need someone down the back.”

“I’ll go.” Capable was already gathering the binoculars into her hands, winding the brittle leather through her fingers. Furiosa, about to leave the cab, turned with a ‘no’ already on her lips.

“I want you to stay together.”

Capable only gathered Caelai into her arms and stared back at Furiosa. If she had not been the kindest of the Wives, Toast would have called the look in her eyes _resentment_. “I can do it,” she said, but she waited for Furiosa to nod before stepping past the Dag and out onto the side of the Rig. Through the doorway that howled with empty wind, where Angharad should have been.

Toast pressed herself back against the wall of the Rig and trundled Tarl out of her lap so she could count. They were alone with that Fool, she and Cheedo and the Dag. Cheedo had a flask of metal-tasting water in one hand, where Furiosa had put it when they’d started the engine. The Dag lay carefully along Cheedo’s curved back, gentle and only half real. In the Vault, Toast had grown thick walls and planted herself in the ground to weather Joe’s hate (and worse, his love). The Dag had instead blown herself away like sand from the top of a dune, shifting and impossible to catch. Even now, when there was only the Rig and the wind, the Dag was not quite here. Her daemon sat with her head on Cheedo’s dangling ankle, a silent comfort Toast could not have accepted. Still, a part of her was glad Cheedo could.

 

Tarl was curled up at her feet. She had soft bullets in one hand, a gun in the other. It was comforting, to fall into the trance of counting, to put numbers and shots in her head balanced like a drop of water on her palm. Toast let the silence pass around her, and Cheedo was half asleep with tears dried on her cheeks. The Dag traced one of Joe’s emblems hammered into the ceiling, her fingers delicate and almost gentle.

The Rig ate up the miles, straight as a bullet through the flatness of the Wastes. Toast had never been on the other side of those mountains; it was somehow disappointing to know that the sand looked just the same on the other side. Still, this was the side of the mountains the Green Place was on. Toast had very little faith to give, nowadays, but she gave faith to Furiosa. Furiosa who knew where a Green Place was, and promised to take them there, no matter the cost. Furiosa would bring them through.

Toast glanced up at their silent driver through her lashes, measuring. He was both of the Rig and not, part of their group, and not. More than a feral, but still just a Fool. “We’ve only got four for the big boy here, so he’s all but useless,” she said, watching carefully as the dingo craned her head around the seat to watch back. “But we can squirt of this little pinky a raunchy twenty-nine times.” Her voice danced like it had in the Vault, but the Fool only glanced at her through the mirror and put his eyes back on the sand.

The Dag curled down to rub her daemon’s ears between her fingers, run her palm across the vixen’s head and across Cheedo’s ankle. “Angharad called them anti-seed,” she said, more to her daemon than to anyone. Cheedo curled the linen tighter around herself, shivering in the evening heat. Toast knew better than them that once the sun fled it would grow _cold_.

“Plant one and watch the thing die,” the youngest whispered, without blinking.

That got only a heavy, full-body shake from the daemon in the front seat, and a thoughtful scowl from the Fool. Toast went back to her sorting, a prayer in her fingers she would never say out loud. _Let this be enough. Let it carry us through_.


	17. Sunset

He didn’t even see her until she stepped down into the sentry’s nest, her white dress blowing in the wind. Nux tried to stifle his whimpering, reached up to rub away tears with the back of his hand. The white paint that marked him as a War Boy was all but gone – nothing but his own thin skin left. All of him felt strange, like leather stretched too tight and scraped too thin. The euphoria of the Immortan’s gaze was gone, leaving his legs trembling and his vision spotty.

And he had been seeing things for the past few hours, things that weren’t there. He thought he saw his daemon once, made out of sand, and he’d come so close to leaping off the Rig after her. It was only more cowardice that’d stopped him in the end. Nux had sat silent, and after a moment the little sparrow shape of her had gone away. It wasn’t really Aesina anyway; when he saw her again she would be made of chrome and shine like true Aqua-Cola. He had been so close.

After a time the Wife turned to look at him, a real daemon clutched in her arms, and Nux thought he must be seeing things again. He only shivered, because he couldn’t stop, and blinked up at hair red like blood.

“What’re you doing here?”

The words didn’t quite make sense. It was like looking at something through a mirror; you couldn’ttrust what you didn’t see with your own two eyes. Nux answered, but he didn’t think he was answering _her_ question. He was answering someone, something else. Aesina, maybe. He spoke to her sometimes, when no one was listening, even though she wasn’t there. Even though she was a wound inside him, still bleeding.

“He saw it. He saw it all. My own blood bag driving the rig that killed her.” In the shine that came when the Immortan himself had put chrome on his lips, the Splendid had looked like a sun come down to earth, gold and round and too beautiful to touch. Nux had watched her fall, and he hadn’t even jumped to catch her like a War Boy should. She was the thing the Immortan treasured most, and she was dead because Nux was only _mediocre._

“Stop doing that!”

The pain bouncing through his skull wasn’t unusual – he hadn’t even noticed he was hitting it. It was the softness of her voice that stopped him, whispering, “Shh, shh, shh.” Her hand pressed against the curve of his skull, but it was a comforting weight, not a dangerous one. “Stop.” Nux let himself fall still. He could feel the soft leather of her glove, the quiet warmth of her hand noticeable, now, in the shadows as the sun fled.

When he chanced a look, to make sure she was real, the Wife sat back suddenly, pulled her wrap around her daemon. She looked. Afraid. Human. Not like he’d imagined the Immortan’s Wives, really; he had always thought they would be cold and distant to someone like him. She looked like someone he could talk to, even if he couldn’t manage much more than a whisper.

“Three times the Gates were open to me,” he said miserably, not sure if he would get absolution or condemnation from her. Not sure which he was looking for.

“What gates?”

“I was awaited in Valhalla.” Surely she knew. “They were calling my name. I should be walking the Immortan roads, McFeasting with the heroes of all time. I should be walking with a new daemon, shiny and chrome.”

She exchanged a _look_ with her daemon, something sad and thoughtful and silent. Nux only watched as the Wife set her daemon at her feet and curled up in the bottom of the nest with him. She brushed thick, long hair away from her face and looked at him straight on.

“I’d say it was your manifest destiny not to,” the little daemon said, curling up under the Wife’s arm.

“I thought I was being spared for something great.” He didn’t know how to look at her – was he supposed to talk to the daemon? A memory stirred, somewhere dark and hidden in his brain, and he heard his mother’s polecat singing softly as she put him to sleep. “I got to drive a pursuit vehicle.” That was more important than a dusty old song, he knew it was. After all, the polecat daemon was dead and so was Aesina, so what did it matter that he’d been safe once, and listened to a lullaby? “For a while even Larry and Barry stopped chewing at my windpipe.”

“Who are Larry and Barry?” The Wife watched him with something like fear, still. Nux remembered her face, looking down at him, shouting words he knew but didn’t understand. It was hard to believe she knew so little, about Valhalla and the Immortan roads and promised land. Wasn’t she in a position to know them best? Didn’t the Immortan himself sit in the Vault and tell his Wives the stories all his War Boys whispered?

“My mates.” The closest thing a War Boy had to a daemon. “Larry and Barry.” They were only poisoned lumps of skin, but they were a better audience than most of his crew. “If they don’t get me then the night fevers will.”

It seemed wrong, somehow, to talk about dying when this full-life Wife was here, shining softly. But she still didn’t scold him, or even look away. She reached out instead, a careful, steady hand, and ran the back of her fingers along the cracked chrome of his lips. Nux shivered, but not in fear or pain or even the last bits of the chrome-fumes. This shivers started somewhere deeper in him, in his chest where exhaust fumes usually sat.

“What’s your name?” she asked at last, and let her hand fall away. It sat, palm up, on the blanket between them, and Nux couldn’t stop remembering that it was there. That she’d reached out, and she hadn’t pulled away.

“It’s Nux,” he said, almost whispering. Thinking that this was the second time today he had given his name, and that this was the only time it felt like someone was listening.

“I’m Capable.”

They lay still for a long while. Nux found it easier to watch her hand than her face, her kind green eyes. And looking at her daemon made the invisible wound inside him bleed, gush out emptiness that he would never fill. So he did not look at anything but her hand, skin smooth and unspotted, free of callus or scar.

“What do I do?” he asked, when the sun had vanished and there was only a pale glow left in the sky. The Wife – _Capable_ , he knew her name, he knew a Wife’s name – only sighed and shifted so that she was sitting against the back of the nest.

“I suppose that’s up to you,” she said, her daemon settling by her side. “Do you remember what she said to you? Before we threw you out.”

Nux gulped at the hideous reminder of his failure, but Capable was looking right at him, holding him still with just her quietness and her expectation of an answer. He scrambled for one, remembering his chain around the traitor’s neck, the unexpected resistance of the Wives. The dull pain of teeth in his arm. He had remembered not to lash out at them.

“She said. Battle fodder. Killing everyone.” He glanced up at her, desperate to make her understand. “But we – I’m only doing what I’m told.”

“You’re not anymore, are you?” Capable was still kind, still soft, but she was implacable as well. She looked down at him and there was no escape from the answer to her question.

Nux curled in on himself. This time he felt it when he started hitting his head against the floor of the nest. Stupid, coward, _mediocre_ Nux, who couldn’t even get to Valhalla, who might as well have died in the Blood Bank rather than screw everything up.

“Stop that, stop. Capable, stop him.”

It was the daemon. She crept forward, tiny furred head outstretched, her strange long ears flicking back and forth so fast Nux couldn’t keep track of them. The Wife held his head in her hands, and how could he risk hurting her? So he stopped, staring at the little creature, who saw him watching and only turned her head to look at him more closely. She did not flinch away.

“Her name was Angharad. She said to me, _we are not things_. We cannot be bought or sold. We are not _things_ to treasure. She meant, _you_ are not a thing. You are not a gun, or a knife, or a chain. You are Nux.”

He could not think of anything to say, after that. And Capable did not make him try. She only leaned over him, and his head was resting on her hand instead of the cold metal of the rig, and it felt. Different.

“I have to go back,” she whispered, when he had drifted half to sleep. Nux jerked himself awake, but in the end he only blinked up at her and nodded. It was cold now, with only the moonlight rising in the east, and Capable wrapped herself tightly in her white dress before picking up her daemon and ducking out of the sentry’s nest. Nux turned to watch her go, feeling like all the warmth in the world was leaving with her.

Without Capable there, he had only her words to remember, and only the ideas bigger than words. What did it mean, to be different than a car or a gun? He had only thought that War Boys like him were less reliable, because they got sick and died and tried to get to Valhalla before then. A gun or a car you could count on for thousands of days. A War Boy would be lucky to get more than ten thousand.

What did it mean, if Nux was _more_ than a gun, or a knife, or a chain?


	18. Mud and Milk

The dark did not creep out here, the way it had in the Vault. In the Vault, the night came in slantwise, stealing across the floor and dripping up their chairs. The Dag had experimented, trying to escape the night. She pulled her toes up the stairs, away from the shadows, until the jaws from above came down and swallowed her whole. She sat in the little pool of light their standing lamp left, blinking slowly, until the ring of light was all she had left, and there was no room outside, no Vault. She was alone.

Out here, the night was alive. The Dag laid against Cheedo’s shoulder, staring into the little lantern Furiosa had pulled from the Rig’s hold for them. The moon was all around them, not filtered through glass and too-clean air. Cheedo’s arm was hooked with Capable’s, whose hare sat on Toast’s sleeping lap. Toast looked so much sweeter while she slept. The Dag peered at her over Capable’s shoulder, running her fingers along Cheedo’s arm. Toast asleep, was unassuming, vulnerable. Her head was resting on Capable’s shoulder, more comfort than the stubborn Wife would accept in all her waking hours. The Dag had a sudden urge to reach out, to touch her pale fingers to Toast’s dark cheek, to transfer some warmth from herself to Toast.

Furiosa was riding passenger in her own Rig, something the Dag had never thought she’d see. The Fool who’d attacked them, the same Fool who’d driven them out of that canyon, cool as cucumbers, was still driving. When they’d brought Cheedo back, away from the bodies, away from Angharad’s fall looming like mountains, the Fool had waited by the Rig’s front wheel, a wrench in his hand, a Wretched daemon ready to be kicked. Furiosa, whose daemon sat on her shoulder, only picked up the water can and walked around to the passenger door. The Dag had leaned out, a little, to see the Fool nod to himself, tap the wrench against metal straps on his leg, and pull himself back into the Rig. He stood crooked, the Fool, but he drove like a bullet.

And then the Rig swerved out from under them.

At first she thought it was on purpose – the cab swung from side to side with the weight of their cargo, with the slippery mud under their wheels. The moment the Fool took his weight off the gas, something in the crust of the ground broke. The Dag fancied she could feel them sinking, a lurch in her stomach not at all like falling, and the smell of something long, long dead in her daemon’s wicked nose. The Rig lurch forward a few more feet, but that was all.

Cheedo, without thinking, clutched at the Dag’s hand, who grabbed back at once. Furiosa looked up, around, and without hesitating shoved open her door and leapt out into the bog. The Dag couldn’t see her, but she saw the little eagle shudder and gag at the thick, clinging plop of mud beneath his human’s feet. “Get the dead weight,” Furiosa glanced up at the Wives. “Lose the spare parts out of the hold.”

She didn’t say a word to the Fool, but it didn’t seem to matter. His daemon leapt down after Furiosa, and he followed soon after. They moved separate, but together – human and daemon, but not like it should be. There was something about them that made the Dag’s smallest hairs prickle like lightning was coming. When Furiosa and Toast and Capable yanked at chains holding young tires up against the belly of the Rig, the Fool gathered cans, all tied together and sloshing with something poisonous and fiery.

The Dag tied her thin blanket in a knot around her shoulders – no protection at all against the desert cold, but better than feeling that cold on her skin. Pheona stayed up in the Rig with Tarl and Caelai, their feet and backs too small to help. Cheedo helped her heave ho the last tire; as it went rolling down the little incline towards dry ground, the Dag saw a glimmer of bright light on the watery sand in front of them.

It was bright like sunrise, there were so many cars. The Dag held up her hand as if measuring the specks of light and metal in the distance, a familiar smile on her face. If only everything could be seen from so far away.

Pheona’s bark called her back, and she turned back to their chase, her smile still mocking and empty.

 _If Joe would bring the sunlight,_ she thought viciously, _then let there be eternal night_.

 

They ran. Pheona stood on the seat next to her, fur bristling as she peered out the window back towards the encroaching light. “We’re the hunters,” the vixen whispered, but for once the Dag didn’t know who the words were meant for. Was it only empty air she spoke to, announcing their presence as they raced the bog into midnight? “We are the hunters, not the hunted.”

Furiosa only looked ahead, as a hunter should. Eyes forward. But the Fool sat next to her, and he kept glancing back with the glint of a feral in his eye. The Dag ran her fingertips over the back of her hands, feeling the raised ridges where her ink hadn’t gone in quite right. He knew more about being hunted than any of them, that Fool.

Even with the lightened load, the Rig was _heavy_ , and its monstrous tires were not made for skating over quicksand. They got stuck. And again. Furiosa didn’t have to tell any of the Wives to get out, though it was the Fool who climbed up onto the hood to throw down the engine plates. He never spoke a word, only picked up the sheet of metal and grunted when Toast went to help him. They shoved the metal down into the dirt in front of a wheel, and in front of the other Capable and Cheedo piled muddy sand like a mockery of children playing games. The mud smelled of dead things rotting badly, not the clean rot the Dag remembered from the waste pits of her old oasis. This was a dank and polluted smell that coated her hands and her feet and the edges of her make-shift skirts. The white grew dark and heavy with mud, and the Dag forced herself not to wonder what it would be like to die in this mud. In this smell.

It got harder when the shots started.

At first they were only sounds – they had outdistanced the Armada, the lights nothing but a memory hidden by fog. Everyone turned – the Fool’s dingo snarled before she could stifle herself, and the Dag _felt_ Pheona’s muscles freeze. A memory of another pit of mud, another hunt by Joe’s Armada, rolled over her, so that she almost didn’t notice the sudden noise of the Rig running away without them. And then it was gone, their only shelter, and she raced Furiosa back as Capable shouted a belated explanation.

“The War Boy!”

“I thought we threw him off the Rig!”

How was Capable standing there, where Angharad had fallen, advocating for a War Boy? The Fearless Fanatics, Leander had called them, and he had not meant it as a compliment. But the Rig shuddered to a halt, digging her feet back into the mud, and Furiosa nearly pulled the War Boy from his seat at the wrenched wheel. Her eagle sat on the War Boy’s shoulder, beak pressed to the daemonless Boy’s jugular; the Dag shuddered in sympathy. A daemon touching that white-painted skin, where no daemon belonged anymore.

But she looked a little closer, tilting her head and chewing at a corner of her thumb. It looked like most of that white paint had worn off the War Boy, after such a long day of doing war and hunting Wives. He spoke too quickly, earnestly, even with Furiosa’s eagle drawing blood where his claws sank into the meat of a human shoulder.

“He means the tree.”

“Yeah. Tree.”

The shots continued, popping sharp in the blur of the fog. It was Pheona who spoke, who made the Dag turn again and take notice of the life-threat. “Does anyone notice that bright light? Encroaching gunfire?”Their life had been threatened so often today that the shuddering hum of another engine had barely made an impression.

The Fool walked past her, limping, and the Dag took half a step away without thinking. With the rifle in his hand and the dingo at his side, he did not look like the quiet, confused man who had been driving them so far from Joe.

He looked like Death, dusty and implacable. It was not Joe’schrome death, come to carry War Boys to Valhalla. He knelt on the ground and his daemon fell into a crouch, her chin just centimeters above the mud on her paws, and he was a Wasteland death. The Death that had taken her family on their long exile through the sands. Impersonal. The Dag watched him, and Pheona watched the Rig, and when Furiosa said, “Get out,” to the War Boy she was really saying _so your blood doesn’t get on my seats when I kill you._

The War Boy argued quietly, and Capable stood up for him, and the Fool fired back at the light coming to kill them.

“You’ve got two left,” Toast said, without hesitating. She rolled her eyes a bit when she said it, but all of them (even Furiosa) watched as he missed the second shot. There was a faint _squelch_ as the Imperator shifted her weight uncertainly. The Dag found that she was biting her lip, worrying it red and sore, and switched to chewing on a piece of hair instead. Less damage that way. And Joe had always hated the habit.

Furiosa passed a gun to Toast, trusting because there was no other way, and went to stand at the Fool’s back. She reached out, an aborted motion, and knelt like she meant to take the shot herself. But she said nothing, not an order or a plea or a terse half-sentence. The Fool handed her the rifle anyway, offering it back without so much as a grimace. The Dag filed away their wordlessness, to think about when there was time. She had never seen Furiosa so reluctant to take charge.

The Imperator set her rifle on the Fool’s shoulder, a living buttress, and his dingo did nothing but twitch her ears. The Dag was the only one standing close enough to hear Furiosa’s whisper, “Don’t breathe,” and the stunned moment before an explosion. In the distance, that terrible searching light went out.

There was no time to celebrate. Besides, the loss of light would only slow the fuckers down. “Hey, War Boy!” Tarl was snapping at his heels, and Furiosa’s eagle was still clutching bloody claws into his shoulder, but the Boy was moving anyway, words tumbling out like jumbled stones.

“Gonna use a winch. Round the tree thing.”

Toast didn’t shoot him, and Tarl only ran after him a few steps. Furiosa paused by the side of the Rig, holding the bullet-less rifle up to Capable. One smooth motion. Trust because there was no other way. “Let’s get the engine plates.”

It felt _wrong_ , to turn her back on that Boy’s bare head, his stumbling, daemonless run. It felt wrong to run back towards the Armada, even to pick up the heavy plates. The Dag heaved with Toast, and that damn Fool let the War Boy drive the Rig. Pheona glared and leapt into the cab herself. They only felt the twinges of their limits twisting in their guts.

The little eagle picked himself up off the War Boy’s shoulder, but he did not go to Furiosa. He banked neatly and tucked himself back into the cab as well, to watch the humans work, and the Dag thought that even the Fool’s daemon, half mad as she was, spent more time with her human than that eagle did with Furiosa.

The Dag heard the strains of shouting in the fog – the lighters were too close. It might not be the whole armada, but there only had to be enough to take down Furiosa (and maybe the Fool). Would the War Boy turn on them like he had in the cab outside the canyon? He was kamikrazee, Angharad had said it herself.

“Don’t they know they’re shooting at _us_?” Cheedo asked. Maybe she meant her daemon to answer the question, or the spinning hands of the alethiometer. In any case, there was no answer. Only shots pounding into the mud like rain. The Dag dropped her side of the plate and ran for the protection of the Rig, an awful feeling spreading through her limbs. She could remember only the limp deadness of the bodies at the spring, but behind her eyes it was Toast who lay sprinkled across the sand like trash. It was Furiosa.

Cheedo.

Toast hugged Tarl to her chest as she rolled under the Rig, moving towards the cab before she’d even put out hands and knees to crawl. Furiosa stopped to stick her plate down under the wheel, but when Cheedo tried to help the Imperator only snarled, “Go!”

In the direction of the tree they heard a low _boom_ that shook the earth under their hands. The Dag forced herself back out, back to running. The memories of calluses on her feet burned. At least there were fewer bullets on this side of the Rig.

She didn’t stop at the cab, either – if it was stuck, there was no saving it. Pheona leapt from a window, fell to the ground with an _oomph_ that shook the breath from their lungs, and lunged after her. When the Dag looked back, only Furiosa and the War Boy (and Capable, her heart cried, Capable was still in there!) were left. It was still stuck. The wheels groaned and spun, digging themselves deeper into the mud.

She and Toast and Cheedo ran past the tree, the Fool still huddled behind it. But his daemon came with them, dingo fur silver in the moonlight. The Dag was too busy running to notice at first how far that daemon was getting from her human; the _booms_ were coming faster and faster, the bullets whizzing by like furious insects looking to gnaw at a human leg, a hand, a heart.

And then the Rig was passing them, running steady along the low hill that stuck up out of the rancid swamp. The Dag could almost have imagined it – the dingo ran up to her human like nothing was wrong, barking out something too sharp for the Dag to hear over the heave of her own lungs. She was still surprised that the War Boy stopped, slowed down for them. He could have kept going. (Did the Dag trust the Fool to put a bullet in his brain for them? How could she?)

“Are you alright?” a soft voice whispered in her ear, like Cheedo’s but accompanied by a sharp _snap-flap_. Jiemba.

The Dag turned and held out her hand, so that the little bat could hang from her fingertips. Where his claws touched her there was a tingling energy, something too bright and fragile to name. “I’m fine,” she whispered back, and looked at Cheedo. “Are you?”

“I’m alright.” Cheedo said, ducking her head shyly. The Dag tucked in a corner of Cheedo’s dark, fine hair, looking anxiously for bullet holes or red stains on white linen.

“You have to take the War Rig, half a klick down the track.” The Fool gathered up guzz, more mines. A machete that he pulled from the side of the Rig with a _schlik_ of sharp steel that had the Dag’s hair on end.

“What if you’re not back by the time the engines are cool?” The Dag had been certain that Furiosa trusted this Fool, but it was not the same trust she placed in the Wives or even in that paint-scraped War Boy. She didn’t just trust the Fool – she relied on him like an extension of herself. An equal, in some way that the Dag or Capable or even Toast weren’t.

“Then you keep moving.”

His daemon said it, quiet, like she didn’t know anything else to say. Like she wasn’t parroting back Furiosa’s own words after Angharad’s fall. And Furiosa had no answer for that – she stood and watched him leave, his run a little lopsided, off-balance, but fast for all of that. Silent.

“What’d you suppose he’s going to do?” Toast asked, her expression invisible from the Dag’s place by the cab. She sounded curious, though. Thoughtful.

Furiosa, by comparison, had a voice as flat and cold as iron. “Retaliate first.”


	19. Light in the Dark

Aurelio went with them. No one saw him go, not even Furiosa. All he had to do was slip out of the other side of the Rig, let himself fall and catch up the air on the edge of the causeway they stood on. He could hear the harsh breathing of the Fool, the pat-pat-pat of his daemon’s feet. The little eagle lifted himself up from the edge of the swamp and swung closer to them, slowing his wingbeats to match their ground-bound steps.

He exchanged looks with the Fool, a wary, half-trusting look. The end of the causeway was not so far away, and the fallen tree just beyond that. Aurelio circled, gaining some height, but he could hear only the rapidly approaching buzz of an engine in the fog. The dingo set herself in the mud beside the base of the causeway, content to wait while her human planted mines in the sandy dirt and scattered guzz along the spaces between them until the reeking rot of the ground turned to bitter gas fumes.

Aurelio circled.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Fool – Furiosa did enough of that for both of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t think the half-feral human could get the job done. It was that he wasn’t _sure_. Aurelio wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Not when to watch Furiosa for direction, not when his claws on her metal shoulder would be a burden instead of a pleasure, and not if he could trust a man who, less than twenty-four hours ago, had been attempting to kill them.

He could not bear to be shaken off of Furiosa’s shoulder, or to sit on her dashboard and feel like an extraneous limb. Something else she could lose, and not care. So he circled, and the buzzing of the pursuit vehicle got louder, deeper. The Fool ran to join his daemon on the sloped side of the causeway, hidden from the first sight of someone coming the way the Rig had come. And the Rig had left deep ruts, beautiful tracks, straight as an arrow. The vehicle didn’t even slow down as it came up the hill, into the path of the mines.

The explosion was a dome of light in the fog that pushed Aurelio a hundred feet higher – he had to circle and dip crazily to avoid the worst of the pressure on his wings. The fire had pushed him too far into the fog. He couldn’t see anything of the causeway down below, could only hear the twisting _crack_ of hot metal, a vicious chorus of baying as daemons fought, and the barely audible _thunk_ of a machete cutting into flesh.

Aurelio took a deep breath, beat his wings twice to get to a proper position, and dove. Down through the heat, still thick enough to make his eyes water. Down through the fog, so thick he was blind for a long second before breaching the dome where it had all been burned away. Down, down, so fast that when he flared out his wings in a small thunder of air, he nearly ran himself onto the gold-soaked teeth of the Fool’s daemon. She howled and snapped at him before recognition set in. Aurelio flapped back out of reach, but she only snarled at him instead of speaking and trotted over to the smoldering wreckage of the car.

The Fool was scavenging. A tarp he’d pulled off the back of the vehicle, a wheel he’d unhitched from the jutting mess of the dash. And bullets. Aurelio landed, started hopping closer so that he could get a look at what kind of War Boy drove a car whose tires had been replaced with treads. Something in the back seat moved, moaned, tried to kick its way out of the wreck.

It was the dingo who leapt first, and buried her teeth in the red neck of the Bullet Farm Imperator.It was no more than Aurelio had done himself – that War Boy’s blood was still on his claws, his beak. He watched the daemon shake her head, viciously, snapping bones ringing like bells in the dark. The Fool only grunted and leaned over to pull another bandolier of ammo clear from the metal twisted into flesh.

Was it right to feel reassured by their silent efficiency, and not disturbed? Aurelio cocked his head from side to side, unable to find an answer. He would have to ask Furiosa. For now, the Fool jerked one last gun free from its holster and heaved the edges of the tarp up over his shoulder. This time, when he walked, his limp was the only thing Aurelio could notice – he and his daemon made a dark silhouette on the causeway, coming back to the Rig, and Aurelio paced them the whole way.


	20. Dreams of Crows

The engines steamed for another half hour after the Fool came running back, blood on his face and his daemon’s teeth. Aurelio swept up and perched on the jutting, broken mirror on the Rig’s driver side, ruffling his feathers. Everything seemed loud in the beating, violent silence that emanated from the Fool.

Furiosa knew that silence too well to disturb it. She kept the pistol in her hand, safety off, a small mimicry of how he had kept guns trained on her, when he had first let her into the Rig. But all he did was hand the Bullet Farmer’s wheel to the War Boy, pull a bandolier of casings off his crooked shoulder. Furiosa answered Toast’s question for him, let him wash copper blood away with the too-sweet smell of milk. Let him unhook the bucket from the dripping valve and let his daemon rinse her teeth, shake her fur clean of blood and Dust.

And still, silence. He only grunted when Toast asked if he was alright, only blinked when Furiosa handed him a rag to wipe away mud and blood and milk. She saw the feral twitch when the Dag reached forward to take her bucket from him, and knew what the frightened thing that lived inside her chest would need, to quiet itself. To become human again. “You drive.”

The Fool glanced at her, and nodded, though he did not speak. And when everyone climbed back into the Rig, he didn’t hesitate to haul himself up into the driver’s seat and flick through the start up like it was second nature.

Furiosa dug out a mostly-clean rag and passed it back to the Wives to clean sandy mud from between their reddened fingers. “And you,” she said to the War Boy, who pressed himself further into the seat behind them. “What’s your name?”

He flinched, though she hadn’t spoke unkindly. The Rig trundled down the causeway, slow at first, and Aurelio fluttered inside to sink his claws into the arm rest at her side. The Fool’s daemon had slunk back into the space at Furiosa’s feet and crouched there, all the hair along her back standing on end.

“It’s Nux,” he said, chin down and eyes averted, a mad dog brought to heel. Brought not by the pain and humiliation and chrome-spattered death, but by Capable and the sweeping concern on her long face, even now. She held onto the War Boy’s hand and did not hesitate to lean against him.

“We are not things.” Capable glared at Furiosa, though she was the one who had lived in the Vault for over two thousand days. It was the War Boy who could not bear to look at her. He, the one who had done war since he was old enough to live through the cut.

Furiosa did not answer. She only turned back to the road ahead, and accepted the rag when Toast offered it. Aurelio at her side was a comfort, a warmth even though she did not touch him. A safety even though he had been gone for so long.

It was Cheedo who saw them first. Or maybe it was her daemon – Furiosa couldn’t tell their quiet voices apart. “Look,” one of them said, and Cheedo raised a hand to point out into the swamp. More tree corpses had appeared the deeper they drove, but until she’d pointed it out Furiosa had not seen the creatures moving among the dead, briny waters. At first she doubted they were human – too tall and lopsided, dressed in rags that covered their whole body.

But no, daemons flickered through their stilt-arms, called out inaudible questions as the Rig passed by. Furiosa let the muddy rag in her hand fall, something terrible stirring in her chest. The Dag was actually standing, as much as she could, watching them with her head bobbing back and forth to keep the bog walkers in sight. The flare gun was in her hand, her daemon’s quiet whispers lost in the growl of the engine. When the Fool’s dingo hissed sharply, the vixen fell silent, and there was only the sound of crows, cawing a raucous scream against the disturbance of the Rig.

 

At dawn, they switched drivers. The Wives barely even stirred when the Fool let the Rig grind to a halt, though the War Boy who’d taken up residence in their back seat sat up and looked around. Furiosa could almost, _almost_ see the shadow of a daemon on his shoulder, eyes gleaming when he stood to attention.

The Fool could only look at her out of the corners of his eyes, licked his lips and tapped his fingers on their new wheel. “Can’t run us off the causeway,” he said, each word clipped, forced out like wire pulled from old metal. “You drive?”

Furiosa only nodded slowly, pulling her feet up and away from the Fool’s daemon as he shoved open his door and half-fell out below her sightline. She climbed around to the driver’s seat and set her human hand on the half-melted bullets, settled into the half-trance that came with driving into sunlight, out of the dark. After a moment, when the Fool banged on the passenger-side door, Aurelio fluffed up his feathers and came to perch on the wheel between her hands, his head tilted up to ask her something. For answer she only ran her thumb down his back, feeling with a delayed wonder the softness of his feathers, the trust no other being would ever put in her.

Though she only glanced at him for a moment, running through the start sequences, Furiosa thought the Fool was feeling something similar. He was curled over, his forehead pressed to the broad skull of his daemon, fatigue setting every line of his shoulders. The dingo nipped lightly at his wrist when she’d had enough, and curled up on his feet to sleep.

By the time the causeway flattened out and the Wasteland curled up into dunes, the Fool was dead to the world, his snore a quiet, almost delicate thing. Furiosa glanced back at the Wives huddled in the back seat, and for the first time since she’d turned the Rig away from Gastown, something almost like peace trickled down across her shoulders.


	21. Heart's Bait

Daemons did not dream. Epharia knew nothing in the space between resting her head on Max’s foot and the kick that bashed the back of her head into the Rig. She did not make a sound – fear was rolling off of Max in waves, and the rush that came from fighting for your life.

It was Furiosa’s voice that laid the hackles down on Epharia’s back, calmed the roaring of Max’s heart. “It’s alright,” the Imperator said, soft as they had ever heard her. “Get some rest.”

Epharia remembered then, where she was. What she was. She turned herself around in the footwell, so that she leaned against Max’s legs and looked up at Furiosa. The little eagle sat on the steering wheel, apparently unconcerned with the possibility Furiosa might dump him off with a sharp turn. There was silence for a moment, a peaceful kind of quiet. The Wives slept in the back seat, their daemons sprawled across laps and curled feet. Epharia could hear them breathing slow.

The heat of the Wasteland sank into her fur, a physical weight matched by the thrumming exhaust of the engine. They were moving steadily, the grind of loose sand audible to Epharia’s sharp ears under the engine’s growl. So they had left the causeway then.

She was content to sit silent, to watch the danger in the cab (Furiosa, it would always be Furiosa who was most dangerous, Epharia never questioned her instincts on that) and wait for the sound to change. When they reached the Green Place, it would grow muddy again. Or would she smell it first. Would it smell like grass and sun and growing things? Epharia found she could no longer remember what a living world smelled like. It had been too long, perhaps, or the blood and dust had scoured away those memories. (The scent of cedar trees growing thick on May’s farm. The dune-grass on the hills behind Jessie’s house. Epharia realized with a stifled howl that she could no longer remember Jessie’s smell, or that of her daemon Ossiande.)

Max shifted in his seat, picking at the rags Furiosa had wrapped around his injured hand. He broke the silence with a hum, looking anywhere but at the sudden anguish that had shaken Epharia. No matter where he looked, though, the emotion slipped out in his words, in his breath.

“How do you know this Place even exists?”

Furiosa was silent for a moment. She looked away too, and her daemon bent to pluck gently at the metal of her hand. The quiet bloomed between them like a living thing; it was not that she refused to answer. It was that she waited for the words to fall like water into a pool, each drop precisely placed. “I was born there.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I didn’t.” This answer was quicker, sharper. More alive. “I was taken as a child. Stolen.”

Max nodded slowly, waited for the words to settle in the air before his next question. It was only the calm in the center of the storm, this talk, but it felt good to hear words spoken softly. “Have you done this before?” A Road Warrior’s question, practical, answerable. It was not a question required of humans.

“Many times.”

Epharia had the impression that the answer was something bigger, less solid than the question. That when Furiosa said she had driven this Road before, she did not mean she had set tires to dust. The dingo leaned her head against Max’s brace and watched Furiosa’s daemon as his human talked. The eagle hunched his wings around his shoulders, huddled as close as he could to Furiosa’s human hand. His eyes were gold and sharp as knives when they caught hers, when Furiosa said, “Redemption.” It was like a bell rung deep between them. Epharia broke the eagle’s gaze first, looked away and let herself fall back into equilibrium. Max rested a hand on her head, warm and solid and heavy, and for a while it felt like the only thing holding her down to the earth.

 

They switched drivers again after midday. Epharia growled when they did it, climbing back up into the Rig after a break for the humans to relieve themselves and pull food out of the hold. She hated the closeness – Furiosa’s feet pressed into her space, even if she tried not to touch Epharia. The eagle with his claws dug into the holes he’d left on the arm rest, clicking his beak at odd moments. And Max just outside of her protection; if that War Boy decided to go feral, Epharia would not be able to stop him in time.

And yet. A part of her – a part larger than Epharia would have liked – trusted Furiosa to deal with that threat. A part that did not mind the safety the Imperator’s presence provided. It was like this: Epharia did not want to admit that she wanted what Furiosa sought. That when she lay with her back pressed against hot metal, she felt protected rather than cornered. That in the day and night and day she and Max had been in this Rig, their minds had never felt so clear. So alive.

It had been so very long since she and Max had been more than scavengers, wild in the Waste. That place and the things in it did not make room for both sanity and survival. Furiosa, throwing open the sun roof and hauling herself up onto it, created a place that held not only the absence of danger, but the opposite of it.

Epharia could not trust in a feeling like safety – feeling safe got people killed. But she could not help that Max leaned on Furiosa, and that the Imperator leaned back on him, and the space they made was hard to hate. It was hard to hate the lull of humanity creeping back into their shared soul.

It was one of the Wives who spotted the glint of metal, in the distance. Who held out a hand and a quiet word. “Hey. What’s that?”

The eagle fluttered up from his perch on the door of the Rig, his wings clipping the edges of the roof as he took up a lookout beside his human. Epharia, hidden in the footwell, saw nothing but the rusted edges of the cab, smelled nothing but the sand, heard nothing but the _tick-tick_ of the cooling engine.

“I remember something like that.” It was the eagle who said it, after a long pause. He said something else, too quiet for even Epharia to hear, and Furiosa replied.

“No. Stay with me.”

They did not say another word; Furiosa climbed back down, Max started the engines, and they rolled over loose dunes and packed salt flats, towards the only moving thing for hours. Epharia could feel the tension building in the cab, escalating far beyond the importance of such an ambiguous sighting. There was still no smell of water in the air, so this couldn’t be the Green Place.

Furiosa’s human fist was clenched on her knee. The Wives crowded forward into the gap between the front seats, and the War Boy only pretended to be less interested than they were. This was not the Green Place, but everyone was acting like it was the end of the Road.

Just before Max hit the brakes, Epharia heard the first scream.

“ _Help! Oh please, help me, help me! They’ll come back, they’re coming back. PLEASE!”_

The Wives’ daemons stirred restlessly – Epharia caught a glimpse of the hare thumping her broad foot against the backseat in urgency.

“Ah ah,” Max said, the only calm in a fog of tension thick enough to cut. “That’s bait.”

Furiosa did not hesitate. Though it was difficult to tell from her hiding place, Epharia thought she saw the Imperator smile a grim sort of smile. “Stay in the Rig,” she said, without looking away from the sobbing person for a moment. She didn’t blink either, just shoved open the door and let her daemon hop onto her metal shoulder, where he dug claws into the padded armor. Epharia leapt up onto the seat she’d left, finally able to turn and see the ancient, rusted tower hung with glass. The naked figure whose sobs had only doubled when Furiosa walked forward onto the sand.

Out of all the time Epharia had spent with Furiosa, it was true that not much of it had been on the ground, out of the close quarters of the Rig. But as the daemon watched, it seemed to her that Furiosa _changed_.

“I am one of the Vuvalini,” she said, spreading her arms wide like wings. She tilted her head back to look up at the bait, who had at last fallen silent. “Of the Many Mothers. My Initiate Mother was Katie Concannon.” Her daemon soared up from her shoulder, his brown and white wings flashing.Sun to shadow. Below, Furiosa spoke with all the power of the War Rig, her voice echoing into the empty dunes. “I am the daughter of Mary JoBassa. My clan was Swaddle Dog.”

Far above them, the figure on the tower stood and screamed. It was and was not an eagle’s cry – the pitch and tone were all quite right, but the call ululated far too long to belong to any natural bird. All around them, out of nowhere, came the sudden sound of engines.

The Wives peered curiously around Epharia’s shoulders as the bikers slid and skidded down the sand dunes, but Epharia saw only their rifles and the speed with which they ran across the hills to Furiosa.

If there had been any chance of escape before, it was gone now. But something deep and scarred and dangerous inside of Epharia whispered that escape had never been what Furiosa was looking for. Not even when she ran from the Citadel. She had always been running _towards_ something, not away from it. She had always been running towards… this.

Furiosa’s daemon had been joined in the sky by other birds, all of them spiraling down together to land on shoulders and handlebars like they belonged there. Epharia didn’t need to count to know that there were fewer daemons than humans, or to know that these were witches.

How had she not known before, that Furiosa came from the same blood as Max? There were only so many witches left in the world; even by the time of Max’s birth they had been in sharp decline. Witches had always belonged to the wild places, and those had been growing smaller and smaller, before the Last Wednesday. Now, everything about the women screamed of magic: one of them, the one who had been bait, ran up in a loose shift, with feathers in her hair, and even her movements spoke of flying. These were creatures that had never been meant to be tied to the ground.

And for a moment, with Furiosa standing among them, it was like a knot had been undone and there was no Imperator standing there. Only a witch, with a clan and a mother and a daemon on her shoulder, holding up her human hand in a long forgotten prayer.


	22. Meeting the Mothers

Max had never heard of witches getting old. Now, watching the bikers pull down scarves and hoods to reveal wrinkles and silver hair, he found himself more nervous than not, had a ridiculous instinct to pull Furiosa back by the straps at her waist. Epharia, who’d jumped up into the passenger’s seat the moment Furiosa abandoned it, whined a little, just on the edge of hearing.

“How old do you think they are?” she asked, and then answered herself. “Older than the world.”

Just two, three days ago, Max would have felt nothing but the strange, itching fear. He wouldn’t have had the strength to figure out what that fear meant, only that he needed to get away from it. Now, sitting in the driver’s seat of the War Rig, watching Furiosa stand tall and spread her shoulders like wings, her little eagle on her pauldron, he could think clearly. He was afraid of the witches _because_ they were old, because they knew things the rest of the world had forgotten. Not just the fragmented pieces of the world before Last Wednesday that he remembered, but hundreds of years worth of history. The rise and fall of empires, now buried cities in the sand. And these women were still walking after all that.

When Toast opened the door to climb out, when Nux let himself down onto the ground with the same chain that Angharad had slipped from, Max opened his door and stood up, half ready to go with them. But Epharia hissed a warning, and he looked at the coiled tightness in her shoulders, and he stayed put. The Many Mothers were curious creatures themselves, poking and prodding at the Wives, but it was only their way of showing welcome. A softer way than some, in the Wasteland.

“I can’t wait for them to see it.”

When Furiosa had walked out of the Rig, announcing her Mothers to the dunes, Max’d watched her become someone else. Not an Imperator, but a warrior. Maybe even a witch.

Now the Mothers said something, gathered in a bunch. Max only heard pieces; Epharia heard the rest. _We had to get out. There was nothing left. We couldn’t grow anything._ And then, hearing that, he watched that part of Furiosa die, the part that had grown up with witches like these. The part with shoulders spread like wings. Even from his place in the Rig he could see the life go out of her; her daemon hunched forward, wings half spread. He took flight before Furiosa stumbled out away from them, but he didn’t go far, pulled to a stop at the ridge of a dune as cleanly as if he and Furiosa had still been bound by a human range.

When she fell to her knees beside the little eagle, they keened together like the sun would never rise again. It had been a long, long time since Max had lost his home, but watching them, he remembered how it’d felt. Epharia looked away first. “It’s just another scar,” she told him, but there was a wild howl under her words, a howl that would go on forever if she let it loose. “For them it’s fresh, but for us it’s just another scar. Don’t cut it open again, Max.”

He reached out to rub the scruff of her neck instead of answering. Somehow, it was impossible to look away. Furiosa curled her arms over her stomach, put her head down to the sand like a bow, and over her raging grief Aurelio’s keen soared as unending as the wind.


	23. The Offer Into Daylight

It was cold again, now that it was dark. The Vuvalini had set up tents and blankets on the dunes, though the fire they’d started to warm dinner had been put out once the sun faded. Max had left the War Rig’s side to collect food cooked from the Rig’s hold, but he’d retreated after that. It was clear enough that the old women had reasons to distrust men. He didn’t blame them a bit.

Epharia didn’t grumble either - this was the most distance they’d had between them and another human in… well, since long before Nux chained him to that car. It was hard to tell how long he’d spent hanging like a sack of meat, and Max didn’t particularly want to dwell on it.

He sat in the lee of the Rig, feeling stored warmth hum off the metal, listening to the quiet rise and fall of the girls’ conversation. From this distance, it sounded like water singing to itself on the way to the ocean, smooth and laughing. Max shook his head to dislodge the sentimental thought and patted his jacket pockets for a particular piece of cloth. It felt good to have a proper outfit again, everything he might need around his shoulders. Epharia snorted from her place lying next to the tires of the Rig, her body almost indistinguishable from the sand.

Max hummed a question at her, pulling the rough map from a breast pocket and setting to filling in the blank places.

“You,” she said, so quietly he wouldn’t have heard her if he wasn’t paying attention. “You’ve got a full belly, a strong place to sleep; even scouts on our back! You should sleep with me, Max. It’s the only night we won’t have to switch–“ Epharia fell silent, and Max immediately started counting heart-beats. He couldn’t have said why, only that when she stopped talking, something was going to happen.

“Can I talk to you?”

Furiosa’s voice was as soft as Epharia’s had been, almost delicate in the moonlight. Max looked back at her, folding up the map, letting the momentary vigilance Epharia had caused slide away from him. After all, his daemon was right. There were Vuvalini scouts on each of the dunes behind them, and the camp had been set up facing the Plains. These women didn’t strike him as the kind to leave something half done – though they might not care about protecting him, as long as he stayed inside their circle he’d be protected just the same.

“I’ve talked with the others.” Furiosa somehow looked more vulnerable wrapped up from head to toe than she ever did with her arms bare and her forehead black with grease. Aurelio was perched on her shoulder, silent, sleepy. He leaned against her head, a little, but the eye he turned on Max was piercing, turned black in the night. “We’re never going to have better chance to make it across the salt,” she said, but she shook her head as she said it, Aurelio’s feathers brushing her ear.

Max shifted his feet, watching the horizon. Her hair was the same sun-faded brown as the blanket. From the way she stood, held the makeshift cloak around herself, he could tell she wasn’t wearing the prosthetic. Probably hadn’t since she picked it up and came out of the sands, despair in her hands and death in her eyes. There were some things you could never fight, and Max would know. He’d fought most of them. From her place by the wheels of the Rig, Epharia stirred and sat up, and Max felt her curiosity prickle under his skin.

“If we leave the Rig here, and load the motorcycles up with as much as we can, we can maybe ride for a hundred and sixty days.” Furiosa said the words like they meant hope, but she knew what they meant. There was no Green Place. There was no escape. There was just the Wasteland, and wheels under your feet, and guzzoline in the tank. Maybe, if you were lucky, water and food.

Before he’d met Furiosa, Max would have said that was the best life a person could hope for in this world. And now, like then, she pulled the earth from under his feet and spun the sky upside down.

“One of those bikes is yours,” she said, knowing what it meant. A whole life, given freely, without question or asking anything in return. “Fully loaded.” Furiosa turned towards him, just a little, so that she could watch him from under Aurelio’s drooping wing. Her eye and his watched Max with the same sharpness, the same quiet surety that she had showed him with the Rig’s start sequence. Trust, where there should be none. Hope, where there should be hate.

“You’re more than welcome to come with us.”

Max’s denial was automatic, born of what seemed like a hundred lifetimes. “No,” he said, as gently as he could. “I’ll… make my own way.”

Furiosa took a breath, nodded to herself. There was an invisible truth that hovered between them – that nothing but death waited out there in the salt. The difference between them was that Furiosa was willing to drive into it headfirst, because despite everything she knew, the Wasteland and the Fury Road. Despite all that, Furiosa still hoped that she could drive across that Silence, and find someplace new.

She turned away, planting her feet in the soft sand, and Aurelio shifted on her shoulder, ruffled his feathers. Epharia turned her head to watch Furiosa go by, her ears pricked. She looked at Max, pointedly, and then at Furiosa’s back. Max scowled at his daemon, who bared her teeth back at him.

“You know,” Max said, looking down and away, unable to watch Furiosa’s expression. “Hope is a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll. You’ll go insane.”

Furiosa said nothing. He knew she’d stopped, that she was watching him. Max went back to looking out over the Plains, wishing he had never spoken. Wishing he didn’t know her heart better than he knew his own. In the end, she left without another word, which was the way it should be. There was nothing left to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll just let you guys know that I'm aiming for monthly updates. We should only have 5-6 chapters left to go!!


	24. Seeds

Toast and Cheedo and Chess and Weaver sit at the center of the camp, next to the black ashes of the fire they’d put out before the sun set. The Dag tries to sit with them, tries to quiet the rolling in her guts, but there's no help for it. She and Pheona stand and walk towards the invisible lines drawn between Vuvalini scouts.

Capable had taken Nux away after they’d eaten their food – none of the Vuvalini would acknowledge him, and if she was honest with herself the Dag couldn’t blame them. The Boy emanated a disquieting sense of absence, a parasitic hunger that no whole human would want to bear. He spoke and moved and breathed like a real person, but how far from ghost was he, with no daemon? So Capable had taken him away, and the Dag saw the little flame of Capable’s lantern burning in the rear of the Rig.

It has been less than two days since Angharad was killed. The thought keeps ricocheting through the Dag’s head, bouncing off of the half-hidden truths the alethiometer told her, hunched over in the back of the Rig while Furiosa drove and the Fool slept his uneasy sleep.

The problem isn’t that the symbols were difficult to read. Or rather, the Dag is so used to that problem that it no longer registered. She watched the needle dance across symbols she knew the names of only because Miss Giddy had taught them to her. _Cow, cornucopia, cauldron_. The needle flicked across the hourglass and stayed there until the Dag huffed out a breath that misted the alethiometer’s surface. The meaning was too deep for her to have memorized; anything more than five spelled uncertainty – anything more than ten was unknowable. Unless you were like Cheedo.

The Dag steals a glance back towards the blankets Chess and Weaver laid out, the music twirling out from ancient fingers. _Miss Giddy taught us about those_. The words turn around in her ears, fit themselves into new shapes. Miss Giddy had taught them about the past and how to live in it; she’d had no way to teach them to survive the Vault. It was Angharad who had taught them that. To survive, and to keep burning.

The Vuvalini are not what she expected. When the Dag looks at them, she sees only embers, not the fire that is Furiosa. Not the sun that was Angharad.

There is no Green Place. The water is filth, the crows came. The story sounds familiar to her ears; a different verse from the same song. The Dag rocks back and forth on her feet, sliding a little in her too-big boots, and taps slow fingers across her belly. Not swollen yet, but she can feel it inside.

The alethiometer ticks away in the back of her mind, in a fold of cloth strapped to her chest. The edges are freezing where the air hits metal and then skin. _Hourglass, anchor, sword, child_. _Child_. _Child_.

“Stay right where you are, Little Joe,” she whispers to him, bitterly. The world has ended, there will be no future. Her first tattoo, the sprout, catches the moonlight. “Kindness’s lost its novelty out here.”

“You havin’ a baby?” The Keeper, that was what they call her. The Dag turns, a half-smile on her face.

“Warlord Junior,” she sneers at the witch and her tiny nuthatch daemon. “Gonna be so ugly.”

“It could be a girl,” the Keeper says, like its the easiest thing in the world. Like the Dag, unwilling, hasn’t lost her breath to the terror that takes her.

Pheona presses against her leg, and the Dag crouches down to scratch behind her vixen’s ears, moving slow to hide the fact that she is shaking. “You kill people with that, do you?” she says the words too sharply, aimed to hurt. It was the only violence they had, in the Vault.

The Keeper doesn’t stop in her smooth polishing, running practiced, gnarled hands over the rifle like she's born to it. “Killed everyone I ever met out here,” she says, putting the gun to her shoulder. She points it away though, off into the dunes. Her daemon picks bits of hair from around her face, his small words too quiet for the Dag to here. “Head shots, all of ‘em. Snap, right in the medalla.” The witch makes a quick motion with one hand; draws a line through her own head. The Dag, unwilling, can see the small round hole in the Keeper’s forehead, red and glistening.

She does not look away. “Thought somehow you girls were above all that,” she says, because it’s true. Furiosa’s stories had been full of Furiosa, mostly, with fierce women who loved what theyloved and kept each other safe. She had not made the Green Place peaceful, but she had made it full of peace.

These Vuvalini are not the stories Furiosa told. And yet, the Dag has no trouble seeing Furiosa in them.

The Keeper is silent for so long, pinned beneath the Dag’s sharp eyes and sharper words. She had meant to wound. “Come here,” the old witch says at last, and the Dag, shrugging, does. She sits at the edge of the motorcycle, which has another seat attached, and Pheona leaps in like water falling into glass. The Keeper hauls out a small leather bag, half open, and spills out life like blood.

“Seeds,” the Dag breathes it out, only half meaning to speak. She can’t seem to stop herself from reaching in to touch the bags, the glass jars. They are so much warmer than the alethiometer pressed against her chest.

“These are from home,” the Keeper of the Seeds says, pulling one bag out to hold in her hand. And that was natural for her, just as easy as holding a gun. Pheona tilts her head and tips her ears forward, as if to catch the secret in that. “Heirlooms. The real thing.” The Dag can feel the truth in those words, even through the shells that hold the witch’s seeds safe. She picks up a jar and holds it next to her ear to hear them whisper living words. “I plant one every chance I get. So far nothing’s took; earth’s too sour.”

There is a skull, small and only slightly deformed, and the place where a brain once was now holds something green. A bean sprout – the Dag thought she would never recognize anything so suddenly and gladly as that small, leafed thing. “So many different kinds,” she says. No matter how far down her hands reach, there seem to be more seeds, brown and white and creamy and some of them spotted. She does not know their names, but she wants to.

“Trees,” the Keeper says, and there is something desperate in her voice. Something older than the world. “Flowers. Fruit. Back then, everyone had their fill.” The Dag looks up from her inspection, drawn to some power in the witch’s voice. “Back then, there was no need to snap anybody.”

The words fit into a place in the Dag’s mind that had been scrambling for an answer she could never find the question to. Miss Giddy had known it, and the Vuvalini know it, but the Dag could not ask them to tell her what it was because she didn’t know how.

This is the answer she hadn’t been able to ask for. It unlocks a piece of her mind that lives with the old world, and learned how to read, and knows the mitzvahs of an ancient faith.

The Keeper of Seeds smiles at her, a small, sad smile, and the Dag cannot help but smile back. She can’t imagine a world where everyone eats their fill, a world full of trees like the pictures in the Vault books. But somehow, in the way that the Keeper told her and showed her and sits next to her now, the Dag can understand that world.


	25. Sigils

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> December update! I'm going on break in a week and a half so I might manage another chapter before New Years, but there's no guarantee. :/

Capable ran her fingertips along the intricate ridges of scars along Nux’s chest and shoulders. She was leaned up against him, with Caelai curled in the curve of her knees and a War Boy’s arm around her shoulders. She could feel him trembling, from the cold maybe. Maybe from holding himself back from flinching when the edges of her skin caught against his. Rough, then smooth.

She had never lain so close to anyone but Angharad.

“Did you do these yourself?” she asked him, feeling her daemon shuffle so that her back pressed against Capable’s thighs.

“Most of ‘em. With some Slit… helped.” Here in the dark, the sky seemed too close, the stars shining like gunfire. Nux spoke as if he couldn’t draw a full breath. He was looking upward, outward, not back to where their past stood painted white and cancerous.

“The Dag helped with mine, too,” she said, and it was like trading secrets to slip off her glove and show him the sigil inked on her third finger. “I saw it in one of the books.”

“Books?”

Capable tilted her head back to look at him, but there was no sadness in her, and no guilt. Their lives were what they were, no more and no less. She would not have wished the Vault on anyone, nor was she better for having learned the things inside it. “Things from the old world. Full of words, written down.”

“What’s this word mean?” Nux took her hand, ran callused fingers over her palm, and she sighed.

“I don’t know. Miss Giddy didn’t either. She was our teacher, not a Wife.”

When Nux let his hand fall back to his lap, Capable held on. They sat like that for a while. Capable listened to the flicker-pop of the lantern next to her. Nux went back to watching the stars. With her head on his shoulder, she could feel and almost hear the breath going in and out of his lungs, one set only, with no daemon to echo him.

“You said, before,” Nux started suddenly, still holding her hand. “ _She_ said. We’re not things. I think maybe she didn’t mean War Boys, you know, because we’re not _people_ either.”

Capable straightened at once, turning to meet his soft blue eyes with all the truth she could muster. “You _are_ , Nux, you _are_ people, and so are every one of the Wretched and so are every single one of the War Boys. It’s only the old man who tried to convince you otherwise.”

“I don’t mean – I just said that –“ Nux leaned forward, put his head in his hands, growling to himself. “They don’t think I am.” He didn’t have to point out the little Vuvalini camp below them, where the music-box song came drifting up.

Capable glanced at Caelai, and the hare crept up into her arms, whispering words that bled like wounds. “The children Capable carried were a part of her just as sure as I was, but when they came out wrong and bloody, it did not make her inhuman.” Nux turned a stricken look to the daemon, though she didn’t know if it was the children he grieved or the trauma they’d caused. “What was done to you is wrong, on every level,” Caelai continued fiercely, “But it does not make you less human. What parts of our souls those men, that place, has cut away, they will scar over. We are not the things that have been done to us. We are not things.”

Nux watched her for a long time without blinking, without really breathing. Caelai sat on Capable’s knees and watched him back. Capable put a hand on her daemon’s back and one on Nux’s shoulder, feeling his singular lungs move slightly under her palm. She didn’t say anything – there was nothing more to say. Either he believed them or he didn’t. The truths she had learned in the Vault with Cheedo and the Dag and Toast and – and Angharad. Those truths were not always things that _could_ be shared. But Nux ought to know them. If only for himself, and the daemon he had lost.


	26. Symbols

It was easier to sleep in daylight. Cheedo dozed with her head on the Dag’s shoulder, feeling hot and exhausted and safe. Daylight meant she was out of her room, meant she wasn’t alone with Jiemba, meant Joe was pleased with her answers. Even now that she was out of the Vault and out of the Citadel, light still meant those things to her. So while they drove, Cheedo slept, and it was only once the dark came down that Jiemba crawled free of her hair and sat on her shoulder, sniffing eagerly at the clean, cold air.

Cheedo let him dig his gentle claws into the leather of her new vest, ran her fingers over the bracelets Gale had woven around her wrist. It felt like armor, the Vuvalini things against her skin, but it was the kind of armor that made her lighter on her feet. It felt like freedom, a bubble of power in her chest that made her skin tingle and her eyes as sharp as Jiemba’s in the night.

“Look,” she said, tracing the path of the satellite with a hand wrapped in a Wife’s white glove. But she was not a Wife, and she was free.

“Miss Giddy told us about those,” Toast was as quiet as Cheedo had ever heard her, fingers cupped around a dented mug still full of the bitter tea the Keeper had crumbled into a pot of Rig-tasting water. Tarl was curled between her feet, his blunt nose pointing up towards the stars.

“Shows,” Chess leaned back on one elbow, half asleep already, with her rifle leaned up against her side as close as her daemon might lay, if he had been here. Three Vuvalini had no daemons with them; Chess and the Valkyrie and Weaver had looked as strange as Nux, when Cheedo had first climbed down from the Rig and crept closer. But Miss Giddy had told them about this too. Witches, and how their daemons could go halfway round the world from them, and still be whole. It was not like the War Boys at all. “Everyone in the old world had a show.”

“Do you think there’s anyone out there?” Toast asked, pretending she didn’t care about the answer. “Sending shows?”

“Who knows,” Chess shrugged her rifle higher on her shoulder. “Those are the Plains of Silence. Once –“ But she didn’t finish saying what had once been true. Cheedo twisted around, running the heel of her foot up through the cooling sand to look at the Vuvalini more clearly.

“Does it hurt?” she asked quietly, because she had long since learned to see silent pain on the faces of women. “Once upon a time?”

Chess smiled back at her, but it was the smile Miss Giddy used to smile, sad and small. “Once upon a time,” she says, softly, and she didn’t say it the way Cheedo had. The words were different, or the way she said them was. The way they held the air like a half-finished song. “There were great bodies of water, so great you couldn’t see the other side of them. So huge that no bird could fly across. Once upon a time, our lands were bordered only by the sea.”

“Our lands?” Toast nudged her daemon with one bare foot, some of her night-softness slipping away. “I thought there were no witch-clans before Last Wednesday.”

“Hush girl,” Weaver said, not quite snapping. The old witch looked up from her tiny box and shrugged her daemonless shoulders as if compensating for missing weight. “There have always been witches. We have always had clans.”

“It’s true though,” Chess said gently, lying back on her blankets and looking only at the stars, “That there were no Vuvalini before Last Wednesday.”

“I didn’t know,” Toast said, as much an apology as Cheedo had ever heard her offer.

“How could you?” Weaver’s voice was bound up in the song her box was playing. Bound up like the woven band she had placed around Cheedo’s neck. “The past is falling away, especially from humans. Soon there will be no one to remember there even was a Last Wednesday.” Like the once-upon-a-time, she used the words differently than Toast of Cheedo. They had a different meaning, somehow. Cheedo curled her knees up to her chest and practiced the words in her head, weighing them against her own understanding. She had understood so little in her life.

She would like to hear the stories of how the Vuvalini made themselves. She had good ears, like Jiemba. But she didn’t speak, not yet. Her daemon stretched his wings out one at a time, nibbling affectionately at the edges of her hair. “We’ll remember now,” he whispered, just for her. “And when the time is right, we’ll ask the story.”


	27. Strength

As a rule, Toast did not remember her dreams. Or if she did, she pretended not to. It was different, though, to sleep out under the stars again, nothing between her and black sky but her own skin. When she went to sleep it was alone, curled under a Vuvalini blanket while the witches kept watch. Tarl was a round lump, pressed up against her belly and warm with the peculiar temperature daemons kept.

Toast dreamed that she was back in the Vault. Back in the room that had once belonged to Cheedo. Back in the foul dark, locked out of sight until she was no longer ugly. In the real world, she had beaten her fists bloody against the heavy wooden door, she had torn at her hair and screamed furious curses after the man who had hurt her. She had flipped Cheedo’s little bed onto its side and used _that_ to bang against the door.

In the real world, Angharad had come to knock against the other side, once she was back, and Toast had fallen to her knees, sobbing in the darkness.

It did not happen that way in the dream. In the dream, she kicked the door down with one blow, and outside that room the Vault had changed. The empty stars whirled above her, clearer than water where the great glass dome had fallen., cracked open like an egg. She was alone. Great shards of glass as big as she was littered the ground, fouling the carved stream of water and the pool that had been Joe’s favorite place to sit. The bank of greens that had once sheltered the glass from angry Wives were withering, untended.

Above everything, the wind’s howl rose like an angry ghost, tearing at her linens when she ventured out of the little room’s protection. It did not sound like the wind that had shaken the Vault in the real world, a wind as deep and cruel as Joe himself. This wind was higher pitched, repetitive, and almost…familiar. Toast crept towards the open door of the Vault and listened as the wind resolved into screams she knew.

“ _Angharad_ ,” the wind sobbed, begged and pleaded and shouted. “ _Aaaaangharad. Angharaaaaad.”_

In the dream, Toast knew the way to the gardens of the Water Tower, her steps light and quick on the dark stone floors. She knew she had to get to the top of the Tower, she knew who would be waiting for her there.

She heard the others in the hallway, like echoes of water dropped into the pool.

 _“Cheedo, don’t be stupid_.”

_“They were her words!”_

_“You’re not going back to him!”_

In moments she had come to the gardens, which were as empty of life as the Vault and the tunnels had been. The wind screamed louder here, strong enough to push her over unless she leaned into it. Toast narrowed her eyes against the sting of blowing sand, watching plants bend and snap under the weight of Cheedo’s grief.

She found them behind a stand of trees whose leaves had been torn off by the wind. They stretched bare branches to the stars like claws, and Toast shivered when she walked underneath them.Cheedo had fallen to her knees in the sand behind the trees, clawing indiscriminately at the rocky dirt. The Dag was crouched at her side, pulling vainly at one arm, while Capable hovered nearby, one gloved hand stretched out like a War Boy reaching for life he’d never hold.

“She’s dead!” Toast screamed, and the wind fell silent. The others turned to look at her, accusing. In real life, she had said nothing, just let them climb back up into the Rig. Now, her own grief poured out like used oil, dirty and clinging. “She’s dead and she’s not coming back! We thought we were running towards something, she thought–“ Toast felt her voice crack. The Wives only watched, saying nothing. “I can’t. We can’t be her, none of us can. How do we know which way to go without her?”

“Her name,” Capable said, and though she was standing right in front of her Toast could still hear the echoes in her voice. “I’ll remember her name.”

“I’ll remember her stories. The ones she took from Miss Giddy, and made real.” Cheedo whispered, still crouched on the ground, dirty hands wrapped around her knees.

“I’ll remember her words. The words that brought Furiosa to our side, and led us out of the Vault.” The Dag stood up, tall and pale and still as stone.

They waited for her, again. Toast knew she was out of place, a gear disjointed and squealing in the engine. For a moment, there was only quiet in that garden. “I’ll remember her strength,” she whispered at last, feeling the words settle like prophecy on her tongue. Was this how Cheedo had felt, reading the alethiometer? No wonder she had been terrified to give it up. “The thing that kept her free and standing in front of Him, the strength she would have passed to her daughters. I’ll remember that.”

The Wives moved, coming around her and holding her up in their arms. Somehow the stars and sky moved with them, but it was not cold and empty like Toast had feared. The black was warm and comforting, wrapped like linens around her sisters’ arms, and she was safe, and she was crying.

When Toast wokethere were tears still on her face, and she was warmer than she should have been. It took her a moment to realize that Cheedo had curled up with her under the Vuvalini blanket, her dark hair spread out over her and her daemon snoring tiny snores between her face and Toast’s. She knew by the smell that it was the Dag pressed up against her back, thin and curved and warm.

Tarl, waking with her, snorted and nudged his way up to her chest, where she could wrap her arms around him and he could press his wet nose into the hollow of her throat. In the secret language they had made, between daemon and human only, it was a gesture that meant comfort. “Bad dream?” he asked, his voice a low growl barely audible over the murmur of the wind.

“I–I don’t know.” Toast could still feel her own words ringing in her ears. The grief hollowing out her chest had a different feel to it, as though something fundamental about her had changed.

“It’ll be alright,” Tarl dug his blunt claws ever so gently into her arm. “We’re not alone, now.”

Toast listened to Cheedo’s bat daemon, and lifted one hand to wipe her tears away. “No. I know.”


	28. Redemption

They did not leave at dawn. Furiosa was awake to watch the sun rise, running oil along the lines of her rifle before wrapping it in leather. The Vuvalini were quick when they wanted to be, but this morning they moved with the slow grace of good-bye, packing away their shelters and running the Rig dry of water and guzz.

It should have hurt her more that Furiosa felt so out of place among them, her sisters and her mothers. That the Wives, in their total ignorance, could learn more easily to move among the witches than she could. Furiosa felt her whole body stutter, stall out from one movement to the next. She should have wrapped the powder bags in the sand-shawl before stowing it. She should have put the pistol cartridges under the easily-bruised leaves of the produce, not on top of them for easy access.

She should have left her guns in the Rig. Maadi and the Valkyrie were the witches helping her strip the cab of anything useful, but both of them slowed as they watched her gather up the bag of weapons. The three of them were silent for a moment, still. “You need all those?” Maadi asked, and it was not judgement in her voice. She was only being practical.

“Yes.”

They let it go, but she could feel too many eyes on her back. It made her throat ache.

Once everything was portioned out, passengers and witches and daemons balanced on handlebars, Furiosa took the lead. It felt almost like being an Imperator, but no Vuvalini would accept the kind of kamikrazee orders War Boys longed for. Well, except for the one she had already given them. The order out into the salt.

She almost said good-bye to him. To the Fool, who was standing in the shadow of the Rig with his sand-colored daemon crouched beside him. There was a bike left for him, like she had promised, but it felt wrong to start without him. Impossible to believe she’d only known the Fool for three days, one of which they’d spent trying to kill each other. In the end she decided that good-byes were not for road warriors like them. They would never see each other again, so what was the point of wishing someone a good journey?

Their little caravan rode into the Plains of Silence, and Furiosa absolutely did not look behind her.

 

Her body had just settled back into the rhythm of a long ride when she saw him roaring up out of the dust. Shock slowed her bike for a moment, and then he was turning to meet her. Furiosa let herself slide to a halt and lifted the goggles Val had given her.

The Fool came up to her with his crooked walk, and asked for everything. No, that was wrong, he didn’t ask for anything. He told her a truth she’d always known, but refused to speak.

“Alright. _This_. Is your way home.”

“We go back?” The words felt like prophecy when Aurelio said them, sharper than knives.

“I thought you weren’t insane anymore,” the Dag said, and Furiosa closed her eyes.

The Mothers asked for information, impatient at a stop so early in the day.

“He wants to go back from where they came.”

“The Citadel.”

She had killed Angharad to get them away from that place. She had killed Ace, and her crew, and she would have killed a hundred more if it meant going home. But home didn’t exist, and hadn’t for a long time. So she’d gone out into the salt instead, hope a dead thing rotting in her chest.

“There’s a ridiculous amount of clear water,” Toast said, and she was thoughtful instead of incredulous.

The Keeper asked questions like she really thought they might survive such a run. It was Valkyrie, alone and whole, who shook her head first. “It’ll take two weeks to skirt the wall of mountains,” she said, and without looking Furiosa could see the feathers dancing in her hair.

“No. I suggest we go back the way we came. Through the canyon.” The Fool wasn’t even watching her anymore; he looked to the Vuvalini instead, and it was nothing like being an Imperator. This was not a crew that she could command, these were witches and Wives. Those who should have been her people, but she could barely understand the words shuttling between them and the Fool.

They laughed together, softly, and Furiosa knew that none of them, even the dune-hardened Vuvalini, understood what it would be like to run that canyon again. “And how exactly do we take the Citadel. Assuming we’re still alive by then?”

She asked the Fool, but it was Toast who answered. Toast and Capable, who were no longer Vault-softened things. “If we can close the pass, it’ll be easy,” Toast said. “All that’s left are the War Pups, and War Boys too sick to fight.”

“And we’ll be with Nux. He’s a War Boy. He’ll be bringing us home, bringing back what’s stolen, as he’s meant to.” Capable put so much faith in him, this half-life War Boy. Too much, perhaps. Furiosa turned to look at Nux, and she was not the only one. Under the weight of the witches’ gaze, he shrugged, looked down and away.

But then he looked back, and he looked at Furiosa. “Yeah. Yeah. Feels like hope.”

“I like this plan,” the Keeper said, and Furiosa made the mistake of looking at her. The old Blade Dog was smiling. Val threw an arm around her shoulders, smiling too, and it felt like betrayal. The rotten thing in her chest moved.

“Look,” he said, that Fool. “It’ll be a hard day. But I guarantee you that a hundred and sixty days ride that way. There’s nothing but salt.” Furiosa knew it. Had known it since Maadi brought up the idea last night. She had agreed to the run because for those one hundred and sixty days, she would be free. “At least, that way, you know, we might be able to. Together. Come across some kind of redemption.”

Ah. So this was why she never spoke to another human being. At least not as she had spoken to him, that afternoon in the Rig. She had forgotten entirely how words could hurt. Deeper than bullets. Furiosa looked at him with seven thousand days of pain buried in her lungs like dust.

The Fool held out his hand to lead her back into the Citadel. _Redemption_. She didn’t know if it was possible. But she took a breath, and then another, and with Aurelio on her handle bars, she put her human hand in his.

It was perhaps the first time she had reached out to another human since she’d wrapped a Wife’s whites around herself. The Fool nodded to her, and it was as if he’d scooped out the rot without a word. She did not believe that they would make it back. Not through through the assembled Armada.

But with the Fool by her side, she believed it would be worth more to try.


	29. Run Boy Run

With Keeper in the back with them, Nux hovering at Capable’s side and the Nightingale standing in the wind, Pheona barely had room to breathe. She was crushed down in the footwell with Cheedo and the other daemons, listening to Toast’s tiny melody singing out a different time than the engine. Faith moved through her like light, and the Dag whispered prayers she hadn’t spoken in a thousand days.

“What’re you doing?” Toast asked. Furiosa watched the flares go up.

“Praying.”

“To who?”

“Anyone that’s listening.” The Dag said it with a strength she hadn’t felt in long long years. Much longer even then they had been in the Vault. It was a child’s strength, an unsettled strength, and Pheona was not sure how long she would be able to bear it.

 

***

 

The moment the first flares went up, Aurelio took off. He looked to Furiosa first, as if everything had been planned out between them. She did not smile, but nodded once and let go of the wheel to haul open the roof door.

Aurelio and the other Vuvalini daemons were not enough to make even a shadow on the sand, once they were high enough to be out of rifle range. The others had been doing this for a thousand years longer than he had, but Aurelio found himself taking point in a witch-bird V just like Furiosa down below was driving the Rig. From that high, he could see the encampments of the Armada, could see the pale specks of War Boys scrambling for their cars and their guns.

“One man, one dive!” Annie’s sea-eagle called, and Aurelio was only a second behind the other daemons when they screamed a wordless answer. 

Aurelio had spent many hundreds of days studying the attack patterns of the Citadel. While Furiosa had been fighting and snarling her way through the rock, he had been in exile. He had learned how to live alone without the Mothers’ help, and he had watched the Citadel and Gas Town and the Bullet Farm move like snakes over the sand.

Seven thousand and more days, but he had never seen an Armada like this. It moved like a single beast, a hundred engines merging into a single roar. At these numbers, it wouldn’t matter how good Furiosa or even the Vuvalini were. Let five of those pursuit vehicles catch up, or ten, and they would be finished, dragged back to the pack. Even as he watched they crept up towards the Rig, hunting beasts on the prowl.

 

***

 

The first pursuit car came up on their right. Capable didn’t even see it until the Weaver took a shot from her place behind the cab, the long rifle report louder than the roar of the Rig. Caelai was huddled in her lap, teeth bared and ears laid flat. Nux, next to her, was motionless, muscles strung as tight as the warped piano wires from the Vault.

Impossible as it seemed, she had almost forgotten that he was made for War. That those out there were his brothers, white faces twisted into smiles. Nux had a heart like hers, she thought, too soft and too big for the metal cages of their world. Loving him was not at all like loving Angharad had been. Angharad had been hard and bright and shining in all the places that Nux was wounded, quiet, soft.

More than anything, Capable wanted to protect him, and all of them, and keep them safe. Keep the Rig moving. It was the only thing she could not do. She didn’t try and hold Nux back when he went out onto the hood, spitting guzz. The Fool growled and scrambled for bullets; the Keeper leaned back against the cab so that she would be mostly hidden. Capable sat with her daemon in her lap, the Dag pressed against her side and Cheedo’s weight leaning on her legs. They did what Wives always did, when faced with impossible odds and things worse than death.

They endured.

 

***

 

Max scrambled up through the open roof of the Rig to help the War Boy. He didn’t even think about it, when three days ago he had been trying to gnaw off this same Boy’s thumb. Three days ago, Max had been alone even with a daemon by his side. Today he rode with Furiosa, the Vuvalini, and the Wives, and Nux. Of course he went to help the Boy, who looked almost _young_ without his skeleton paint. Almost human.

It was the Interceptor that beat them, of course. His car, the last thing that tied him to Max Rockatansky, who had been a husband and a father and a friend. And a cop, that too. Now he watched the Interceptor sheer away as a witch took out its driver, not sure if what he was feeling was pride or loss.

“We’ve got to back off,” Furiosa said to him, as cool and calm as if they were still speaking under the stars. “Engine one’s gone, and two’s about to blow.” He almost couldn’t hear what she was saying underneath those words. _We’re not going to make it_. Just like he had barely heard them when she talked about crossing the Plains. Furiosa had known from the beginning what this run was.

“Right,” he said, in answer to both statements, and swung back to speak to Nux. “You a blackthumb?”

The Boy choked, nodded. Max realized almost with surprise that he had a hand on Nux’s wrist, the same as the red Wife held Nux’s other hand to comfort him. In the quick rush of battle-thought, Max almost believed that such a touch could help, somehow. “Get to engine one, now. You and me,” he pulled a wrench from the restocked cab of the Rig, knowing where everything would be because it was Furiosa who had put it there. “Fifth wheel. We’ll unhook the tanker.”

 

***

 

Most of the Armada had quick and easy protection from the worst of the witch-daemons’ attacks—they had roofs over their heads. Too risky to lunge inside a vehicle and disable a driver with no guarantee of getting back out the other side. Still, Aurelio and the others did not watch from above while their humans risked their lives.

Gale’s kookaburra daemon laughed as he dove, falling like a stone onto the back of a gunner. In the car next to him, the Valkyrie unloaded a thunder-stick into a cab, her daemon too far away to fight with them today. The kookaburra left his victim a mess of bleeding eyes and broken fingers before launching himself back into the sky, wings fighting the turbulence of the Armada.

Aurelio had eyes so keen he could see every feather in the Valkyrie’s hair as she fell. He heard Maadi’s magpie scream. He watched Gale’s kookaburra vanish in a puff of golden Dust and feathers. Annie’s sea-eagle dove to attack, a battle-cry that was a spell on his tongue. Beneath, one of the claw trucks broke and swerved as the witch daemon threw its engine out of true. Aurelio kept pace with the War Rig, watching it slow to a crawl. Watching the Armada open its jaws, the People Eater’s refinery come up over the fallen Vuvalini like some ancient monster swallowing them whole.

 

***

 

Epharia felt the first harpoon hit the Rig, and the second. It juddered through her bones, dislodged dust from her fur. She didn’t know what it meant until the Weaver shouted down, words stuffed and full in the crowded cab. The Keeper of Seeds had taken Max’s absence as a chance to move up into the front seat, and Epharia had not objected. She was only glad to be in her space by the footwell, and not in the back seat where the Wives and that War boy and two witches had sat.

Max went up onto the tanker, trusting Furiosa to drive the Rig. All Epharia could say was, _“Finally_ ,” as she hauled herself up out of the footwell and leapt to the roof. It was worth brushing fur against the Keeper’s legs and side to be up out of that cab. The leap from cab to tanker was nothing, and then she and Max were together again.

The claw trucks were useless, on their own. They had no mobile fighters, and their harpoons would only wound or kill with a lucky shot. But their purpose was not to bring down an enemy, only to slow it. Epharia saw the first few cars of the Armada coming up out of the dust, and behind them a billowing cloud that hid countless others. With one engine down and at least four harpoons dragging the full weight of their vehicles and drivers, it was only a matter of time before the Rig was surrounded.

She had understood, always, that death lurked closer than life in the Wasteland. She and Max together had had more than their fair share of it gnawing at their heels. The proper thing to do, when a death like this was coming, was to dodge away. Furiosa had even given them an out, that night on the sand. But if he had taken it, he would not have been Max.

There was no hope. This was the Wasteland, and they would never make it to the Citadel. But for Furiosa, and maybe for Max too, redemption came from the trying of it. From fighting to stay human, even if—when—they failed.

So Max went with his bolt cutters and Epharia stood on the back of the Rig, one eye tilted towards the sky.

 

***

 

The grapple-hook went by so close to her face that Toast could feel the burning air of its passage. She jumped back, not that it would have done her any good, and saw a brown, little eagle blur sweep past the Rig. The creaking, cracking groan didn’t slow them down any more than the harpoons had, but Toast could _feel_ the metal under her hand vibrating from the strain. Giving way.

When the wall was torn away from her, she and Tarl scrambled into Cheedo’s lap, more terrified of the dust and bullets than the clinging nature of the Wives by their side. Furiosa’s daemon was on the attack outside, and all Toast could do was hold her badger close and pretend not to hear the Dag still whispering prayers. Above everything she hated being helpless again.

 

***

 

Epharia could not help Max or the Vuvalini with the harpoons—her paws were not made for such vertical work. But when the Pole Cats came dancing through the air, she was ready. One of the witch-daemons shrieked, tangled his claws in the straps of a Pole Cat’s harness, and _shoved_ the Cat down onto the burning, running sand. Another Cat was dead on arrival, a Vuvalini bullet in his throat.

But for every one dead, there were two still alive and landing on the Rig. Something exploded in the crew’s nest, sent Max sprawling. Epharia leapt over him, as sure-footed as one of the Rock Riders’ goat daemons, to tear out the throat of the Pole Cat before he could raise his machete. Max, still holding the bolt cutters, stumbled to his feet behind her and caught another blow with them, went for the Cat’s knee and knocked him off the Rig.

They had always fought well like this, back to back. There were no questions of life and death here, no worries about being human. It was down to one word, the word Epharia and Max had been living by for decades, perhaps. All they had to do was _survive_.

 

***

 

The Dag hadn’t left herself enough cloth to cover her mouth and nose when the gas bomb hit the floor of the cab. Everything was instantly full of smoke and burning, her eyes and her nose and her mouth. Capable leaned forward, covered her and Cheedo in white, coughing with them as the rev of an engine speared down towards them.

A noose caught Furiosa by the throat. The Keeper jumped up—her nuthatch daemon trilled fiercely and flew into the Pole Cat’s eyes. Another came up from behind the witch…he had a chainsaw that sang gas fumes as it moved…Pheona leapt forward too late, too late.

The Keeper sat back down cautiously, one hand on her neck. There was no blood, or very little of it, on her scarf. But Pheona could smell, could taste it on the back of her tongue. Furiosa was busy pulling herself free, tossing the smoker out a window. Keeping the Rig moving.

“I think she’s hurt,” Toast said, and in the tumult of the battle her shout was almost conspiratorial. The nuthatch had fallen somewhere behind them, lost beneath the wheels of the Armada. The Dag thought she ought to thank Someone that it would not hurt the Keeper to be away from her daemon. Now, when there was nothing left.

The Keeper reached out a shaking hand, searching, and with a jolt like lightning the Dag leaned forward, gathered up the seeds and put them in their Keeper’s lap. There was something left. There was green, still, in the Wasteland.

 

***

 

Keeping Cats off the Rig was a job for a full crew of War Boys, not two Vuvalini and Max, who could only sort of count himself a witch. He hadn’t cut the harpoons fast enough; the Pole Cats were all around them now, limited more by their own numbers than the Rig’s lead. With only one engine pulling they would never be able to outrun the Armada.

It didn’t matter. Max bulled into one of the invaders shoulder first while Epharia clamped her teeth in his heel, pulling him off balance and stopping Max from following him down onto the sand.

Another had come down closer to the cab, revving the engine on his saw like he’d already won. It was battle: Max didn’t think. He stole the rifle from the Nightingale’s hands and shot the loading rod through the Cat’s chest. Epharia started forward to defend the cab, the Wives. Furiosa. Max was behind her, until—

Later, he thought it was Glory he saw, the one he had not saved, who saved him. But in the moment it seemed that there were many people standing there, throwing him backward, eyes like stones in dead faces. He put up a hand out of instinct, _caught_ a bolt that should have shattered his skull. After that, there was only a bright ringing in his ears and a mirage laid over all the world around him.

 

***

 

Furiosa could not afford to look back. She felt Aurelio’s thrill like wings in her mind, felt him dodge in and out of range, his claws wet and his beak dripping red. She could almost taste the iron in her own mouth, could almost feel the turbulent winds the Rig and her pursuers kicked up. When Pole Cats started appearing in her windows instead of her mirrors, she knew the end was close. They wouldn’t make it to the shelter of the mountains.

But she thought she could give them better than Joe. Toast screamed, really screamed, and Furiosa reached for her without thinking. It was a level lower than instinct; her instinct said to keep driving. Something lower and warmer and more whole than that told her that the one she had rescued still needed help.

It didn’t matter. Toast was pulled away, kicking and crying, but at least her badger was clutched in her arms. At least his teeth were buried in the arm of the Pole Cat who held her. At least they had that small revenge.

Cheedo was making small, desperate sounds in the back seat; the Keeper was dead next to her. The Dag wasn’t even whispering any more—Furiosa wasn’t sure she was still _breathing_. She kept moving.

She didn’t hear what the Cat was saying, only that there was an enemy shout from above, and then a Cat with a pickax coming down on her. It had been many hundreds of days since Furiosa had been nothing but a driver under siege, but she had not forgotten the terrifying vulnerability of it. The trust you needed to have in your crew when Furiosa could not afford to trust anyone.

The kind of trust you needed to launch yourself off of the tanker and run full-body into a Cat about to shatter her brain. Suddenly the Fool was on the front of the Rig, and Furiosa did not think. She hit the brakes.

It was just enough to send the Cat tumbling without dislodging the Fool. She’d known it would be. But he turned at looked at her, more than battle on his face, in his eyes. Deeper than instinct. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, that they were going to die anyway, and that what she had done for him was just a sidestep from their death.

It mattered.

 

***

 

All the fighting was concentrating at the cab. Epharia almost lost her feet when Furiosa braked, but it stopped Max from going under the wheels, and that was her life in the Imperator’s hands. Epharia watched another Cat land right in front of her, as if her presence in the fight didn’t matter to someone who didn’t have a daemon, and growled wordlessly as she tore at his unprotected neck.

Max was stumbling to his feet; another Cat was revving a chainsaw that had somehow stayed on the Rig even after it’s owner vanished. Max hauled the half-dead Cat Epharia was deveining; she swung down onto the engine plates, let go of flesh in time to hear the ‘saw bite deep in dead Cat instead of Max. When he overbalanced, tipped down head-first toward the sands, Epharia felt his vertigo as her own; crouched down low to the engine and whined instead of catching him. She didn’t catch him.

Furiosa did. A life for a life for a life. They would never be even; Max hung by a metal thread, and even the Wives came to hold him up. To save him. Epharia lifted her lips in a grin that was more snarl when she saw the Interceptor coming up behind them again, again. But she was looking so hard at the chrome thing that had once been hers that she didn’t see the black-masked Cat until it was too late.

Until Furiosa screamed, one bright, terrible sound, and then silence. It was the Wives that threw the Imperator’s killer off the Rig, their daemons hissing and tearing at exposed skin. Every daemon was a weapon if you treated it like one. It was Epharia’s turn to see Furiosa glance up towards the mountains with death’s smile on her face, to catch her eyes and see the same grim determination that had kept Epharia and Max alive so long in the Wasteland

Joe’s Gigahorse passed them, Toast’s face pressed painfully back. Displaying a trophy. The Salvage Rig pressed in on one side, as long as the War Rig but half as heavy. Between Max and rest of the desert, the fat man’s Limo rumbled closer. Too close.

There was a roar from under her feet, an acceleration. Epharia looked back, but Furiosa was focused somewhere else. Back to where the Interceptor was coming for Max like the ghosts would come for him, deadly and shining. Furiosa crushed it, and the War Boy driver, as easily as she would have disposed of a Buzzard. It was only a real threat because of the cars around it, and then it wasn’t a threat at all.

Mourning was for Wives and Vuvalini; Epharia had no time for it. She only let out a shocked bark when Nux kicked Max free, when Max managed to wrap his hands around the grill of the Limo and take cover from the gunner in the back seat. It was one of the witches who took care of that, Epharia couldn’t see which. And then she was following Max in the jump, landing with her feet tangled in gold watch chain and snarling as Max came with her, pulled the driver free like they had once pried out oyster meat, many years ago.

They had called him the People Eater, in the tales Epharia had heard of this Warlord. He stank of rancid sweat and spoiled flesh, and she was loathe to put her teeth in his flabby skin. Instead she crawled into the back, kicking his bald head as she went, to sit with the corpse. Even when the sluggard pulled a gun, Max didn’t need her help. The People Eater’s fingers broke with a snap like everyone else’s, and his broad sides made a good enough shield when they drew level with the Gigahorse. They drew level with the ‘horse, and then they drove beyond it. The long snake of the People Eater’s refinery dragged behind them, parts of it burning from the death of the Interceptor.

 

***

 

Compared to the white smoke one of the Cats had thrown into the cab, the black stuff they hid behind, the trail of the Oil Rig, was nothing. Furiosa was bleeding, her hands were shaking and the knife she had drawn from the gearshift was lying on the floor covered in red.

Cheedo held Jiemba in her hands, covered his eyes with her cupped palms to protect them from the sunlight. She couldn’t seem to stop shivering, despite the heat and the fire everywhere. Her throat was sore, from screaming or crying or smoke. Where Toast had been, her skin screamed at the emptiness.

The Dag had wrapped an arm around her shoulders, but it wasn’t enough. Cheedo leaned into her, watching Furiosa gun the repaired engines, watching another wreck that crunched through her own bones. They pulled level to the People Eater’s Limo, where the Fool and his daemon sat, his face as calm as it had been all through the night of the bog.

Until she told him. Until she found strength in her arms and her legs, leaned out to shout to him. “She’s hurt. She’s hurt real bad.” Furiosa had no breath to scold her, only glanced back at Cheedo with death behind her eyes.

 

***

 

Shock—Furiosa had been hurt. Shrapnel or Pole Cat or lucky shot, it didn’t matter. Through the roaring space between War Rig and Limo, Max saw it in her face.

Shock—Epharia coughed, violently, a spasm that jerked her away from him in the thick, oily smoke of burning oil.

Shock—An explosion rocked the Rig behind him, something worse than burning guzz. Max didn’t hesitate, didn’t wonder what it was. He pulled Epharia up by the scruff of her neck and hauled them both out onto the skin of the Limo.

Shock—they both jumped, reached out for the War Rig and hung on. But it was Max the Cat grabbed, hauling him up, up, dangerous and dizzying. They fought, suspended for a moment and then dropping back to the ground. The range was too close for anything but nails and teeth; too close for knives, too close for fists. He might have screamed. Things like that didn’t stick in his head, during a fight. They might come back later in the dark, but for now all he could do was grab hold of the harness that kept the Pole Cat up.

It was not him that cut the Cat loose. He heard a scream too high to be human, too long and clear. Something sharp cut across his knuckles, and then the Cat fell. He fell but Max did not. The pole swung up again in a long arc, and against the backdrop of fire and guzz Max caught a glimpse of Furiosa’s little eagle beating back towards the Rig.

 

***

 

Capable would never have thought to be _glad_ to see rock walls rising up around them. To her it seemed that the Rig was holding still, that it was the mountains who rushed towards them and swallowed them whole. She sat as close to the center of the cab as she could. As close to Nux as she could. Caelai trembled in her arms, but after Toast had been taken Capable did not dare to put her down. Instead she held tight to her daemon and to the War Boy, and watched Nux instead of Joe when the Rig slammed into the Gigahorse.

The Gigahorse slammed them back, and even she could hear the whine of their engines, the untrue note. One car, only one car between them and the Citadel. Capable didn’t know if it was some God like the Dag talked about, or if it was just bad luck that that one car was Joe’s. Nux said something about engines, something that made Furiosa _react_ , if only to nod.

“I’m going to need you to drive,” she said, and for every time she had spoken as Joe’s Imperator, Capable had never been so terrified of her as she was now. “I’ll get Him out of our way.”

Being Furiosa, there was very little pause between words and actions. She climbed out of the cab and onto the engine, her hand covered in red and her breath shaky. Capable leaned forward, wishing her own strength into Furiosa’s body. For the first time, she felt like she could protect Furiosa, not the other way around.

Nux was a War Boy, sometimes closer to Furiosa and the Fool than he was to her. He picked the bone-knife off the floor and wiped it clean like it meant nothing, slid it back into its place and drove on. Kept moving. Capable put a hand on his shoulder as Furiosa pulled herself, inch by inch, onto the back of the Horse.

 

***

 

Jiemba was hiding on her shoulder now, his soft face tucked into the skin of her neck where her hair would shield his eyes. Still, it was his whisper that gave her the idea.

“They want us back, Cheedo,” he said, but it was not the way she had run to Him before. “They want us back, so _use it_.”

There would be no forgiveness. There would be no going back. Cheedo stripped out of her Vuvalini things, but the armor they had given her did not go away. She was light-footed and fierce and she _knew_ _how this story ended_. And it was not with death.

“Rictus!” she called, making her voice light so it would float over the roar of the engine she crouched on. He saw her first, not Furiosa, who was crumpled on the nose of the Rig. “Take _me_ ,” Cheedo said, and when she reached out her hand she was not wearing a Wife’s white. She was wearing Furiosa’s sun-bleached colors.

 

***

 

“Cheedo, _no_!” It was Pheona who cried, who made the Dag look up from her mourning. “STOP!” She could not have said, later, if it was rage or anguish that propelled her up out of the cab, chasing someone who did not want to be chased. Rescuing someone who did not want to be saved.

“What’re you doing!”

Capable dragged her back down into the dubious safety of the cab, her grip stronger than it had been even three days ago. Because Rictus was still there, the bully, and his daemon was a long-haired cat on his shoulder, running down his arm as he reached down to grab her. Calisthenics dug her teeth into Pheona’s neck too deep, growling her unsettled growl.

The Weaver stood up to defend her, either unaware of Rictus’ stupid strength or disdainful of it. He backhanded her without even letting go. Chess leapt forward too, these witches so ready to extend their family. So ready to die. Rictus threw her off the Rig without breaking a sweat, and the ease of it made the Dag’s empty stomach heave.

Calisthenics was still in the cabin, but Caelai’s teeth were drawing golden blood as she worried at the cat’s sharp claws, and Pheona broke the other daemon’s grip with a whine and a tearing of skin that had the back of the Dag’s neck burning in sympathy. Calisthenics hissed and became a boar, uncaring of how her bristly hide brushed up against Capable’s knee or the Dag’s leg. Out of the corner of her eye, the Dag saw Furiosa rise again. 

The Fool jumped too, ready to fight Rictus for them the same way he had been ready to kill them for water: it meant his own survival. But it was Nux who pulled the bone handled knife from the gearshift, turned and buried it to the hilt in Calisthenics’ heart. His eyes were wide, shocked perhaps, as the boar screamed a too-human scream. She turned into a cobra, a python, a viper. None of them dislodged the knife. Something thick and dusty and golden was spilling out of her, vanishing into the wind of their run. They watched in horrified fascination as the malformed daemon shriveled up from the inside out until the knife clattered to the floor, as clean as bone.

 

***

 

Through the haze of blood loss and oxygen deprivation, Primus came for her. Furiosa took the harpoon and lunged into the cab, missed. Got her head beat and her balance thrown and the Imperator stomped on her chest. It didn’t matter. She saw Cheedo cowering out of the way, and she roared back at Primus and the vulture daemon stretching black wings over her. She roared through blood on her teeth and in her throat, through pain so deep and broad it turned the edges of her vision black. She didn’t have the strength to fight when he grabbed her shoulders and threw her up against the back of the Horse, but Furiosa had not always been able to match War-hungry Boys toe-to-toe. The battles she had fought straight on could be numbered on her fingers.

So when the Imperator overbalanced, when the ‘Horse skipped a beat on the sand, it was easy like breathing to push him over. It barely even mattered that she caught herself on the harpoon chain going down.

But it did matter, because there was Joe, the only thing left between the Wives and freedom. Furiosa kept moving. Her human hand was wrapped around the defunct handle of the Horse’s roof, one leg was balanced on the too-sleek edges of its body. She was hanging on by less than a thread, could feel the fluid pumping into her lungs.

Joe rolled down his window and reached for her with a chrome-plated pistol. Nothing but the best for the Immortan. It was Toast who caught his hand, who threw off his aim for just one second longer. Just one second that Furiosa needed.

“Remember me?”

Joe’s bloodshot eyes were furious and blank. Aurelio dipped into view beside her, wingbeats unsteady but unmistakably his. At the sight of her daemon, Joe roared.

The chain caught.

Blood spattered.

Furiosa was sure she would fall; this was the end, she had done it, He was dead.

But she didn’t fall. And Aurelio made it into the Gigahorse with her, though her mind was blurred by blood loss and burning stars of pain. She didn’t fall, because that fool had caught her.

_I did it, Mother. I survived._


	30. Witnessed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys get TWO chapters because I am ALMOST DONE and also because this one's super short.

“He’s dead!” she cried, the one he’d thought was Fragile. “He’s dead.” Nux felt fundamental truth drop out of the world, again. He struggled to believe her, to understand what it could mean. It was only instinct that kept his foot on the gas as the others climbed. Left the whole world behind.

Joe had been wrong, Joe had been wrong about a lot of things but he had still been Immortan. Now what was left?

Capable put a gloved hand on his shoulder, and Nux came alive again. “When you’re across safe, I’ll jam the throttle, follow you,” he said, and he had never been very good at lying. He looked at Capable, memorizing the way her eyes crinkled up when she was thinking, the way her lips curved when she was sad. He had never looked at someone’s face so often as he had looked at Capable’s. He had never _wanted_ to.

“Come on!” one of the witches said. “Hurry! We’re nearly at the pass!”

And the moment was gone. Capable was gone, her daemon cradled in her arms. She paused, once, to look down at him. He nodded to her, glanced towards the Gigahorse. But they both knew he was not made to cross over to it. Rictus’ resurrection was not chance, just fate. Nux only hesitated long enough for Capable to reach the ‘Horse before he hit the brakes.

Rictus glared back at him, his face twisted into a terrible grimace. Nux had been the one to pour his daemon’s life into the wind, and whatever small sanity Erectus had held onto was gone in the wake of that wind. The Immortan’s second son pulled the supercharger out of its housing; it should have been impossible, but wasn’t. Fire spewed up from the insides of the Rig, half-blinding Nux. He kept his foot on the gas.

When he reached out, he couldn’t see Capable. He could only hope she was out there, somewhere in front of him, driving away. “Witness me,” he said, not sure if he was begging or swearing. And then he turned the wheel.

For this moment, it felt like he had Aesina back again. She fluttered around his hands in the shape of a sparrow, and though he had never seen one before he knew what she was. She settled into a place inside his ribcage, a place that had been aching and empty for so long he would have cried with the filling of it, if he’d had any tears left.

The cab of the Rig crumpled around him, but in the rush of metal and fire there was no glory like he’d thought there would be. There was barely even any time for pain. Capable’s hand reached out to him, forever. He was not made of chrome, but something soft and quiet and, for just this moment, whole again.


	31. Named

Furiosa was limp and soft and almost dead when he pulled her into the cabin of the Gigahorse. Her daemon had collapsed outside, a small bundle of feathers disjointed and barely breathing. Epharia had brought him in while he carried Furiosa, while the Wives and the witches crowded around.

There was a stink of blood and death already here, emanating from the white corpse up front. It was the Vuvalini who shoved the dead thing out onto the back stoop, hauling rotten skin and plastic armor out past him and Furiosa.

Furiosa, who had saved him. He’d lost count of the times; the number didn’t matter. Once was enough, was too much. That he had already saved her in return didn’t matter either, was no longer something he could use to pull away. It went deeper than instinct, even in the midst of a Road War. She needed something, so he gave it.

“Why is she making that _noise_?” the littlest Wife asked. He could not call her the youngest, anymore. None of them were young.

“She’s pumping air into her chest cavity. She’s collapsing her lungs, one breath at a time.”

He had never learned the witches’ names; he did not know what to call this one. This one whose daemon was a sea-eagle three times the size of Furiosa’s, who perched on the harpoon at the back of the ‘Horse and hunched his shoulders.

“I know,” he said, with no names attached. In that red moment, with Furiosa rasping and dying, he thought that there might be no names at all without her there to give them. Like she had given Fool to him. Like she had given trust to him, and asked nothing in return.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, and slid a knife between her ribs.

Furiosa gasped in, breathed out a noiseless scream. Breathed in another.

“I know, I know,” Max whispered, dropping the bloody knife without a second thought, already reaching for the clean white fabrics Joe had left in his shining ‘Horse. For a man so fixated on glorious death, this place was well supplied with tools meant to preserve life. Now it turned against Him, as Furiosa had.

“Hold it there,” Epharia snapped, when the Vuvalini reached out her ancient, strong hands to Furiosa’s shoulders. “Put it there, press down.” The dingo put her front feet up on the steel table, nipping at the Vuvalini’s sleeve to put human hands on human skin.

Max packed a bandage together, and Furiosa’s eyes flickered open. “Hey,” he said, softer than before. He reached out without thinking, cradled her head in his hands. Epharia whined and dropped back down to nudge at Aurelio, who shuddered and turned his head towards her.

“Home,” Furiosa rasped, and that was worse than the noiseless scream. Max leaned towards her, picked her up. He had never been so careful with another person, so exactingly aware of every place they touched. Her hand was clenched in the sleeve of his jacket; he could feel her labored breath vibrating through his fingertips where they pressed against her neck.

She was still speaking, but it was so soft he couldn’t hear. Max wished fiercely for Epharia’s ears, but she was listening to Aurelio keen something that should pass only between daemons. So he only frowned, put his cheek to hers. If this was the last thing she wished, he would do it. He would do it if it meant riding out across the salt, because after this day, he thought he might actually make it somewhere.

“Get. Them. Home.”

He felt it when she left again. When her eyes closed and she slipped down, away. For a moment, with his eyes closed, he could almost see her fall away across a vast black distance, and there was no light without her there to give it. “No, no, no.” Not when they had been so close. Not when they had brought the Wives out of that canyon alive. “No, no. Don’t go.”

“She’s exsanguinated,” the witch said, handling old words as dispassionately as she had handled her rifle. “Drained all her blood.”

Something on Max’s back burned like a brand. O-negative. _Careful there_ , a slimy voice shouted from the shadows of memory, _That’s the universal donor._

Max wasn’t aware of saying anything out loud, but the Wives passed him needles, held the tubing when he asked them too. The pale one bit her lip so hard it bled, but her eyes were wide and alert when he turned to her, traced his blood up into the air.

He still apologized when the needle went into her arm, a thimble against the tide. Small, delicate Wives’ fingers came to hold it in, hold it steady, and he let them. Let it go. It was done now, or it wasn’t.

Epharia picked up Aurelio, so gentle, with feathers between her teeth, and put him at Furiosa’s side. Max leaned away to give the daemon space, ran his hands again over the soft prickling of Furiosa’s hair. It was done or it wasn’t. She would live or she wouldn’t. In the wake of panic, Epharia was there to put her head on his arm, to let a soft whine through her teeth. When he spoke, it was the first time in ages that his mind had not stumbled on the words. That word and thought were equally clear. As clear as Aqua-Cola.

“Max. My name is Max.” The strange twitches on his face might be a smile, if he thought about it hard enough. “That’s my name.”


	32. Dreaming

Somewhere, her breath rasped through her ribs, did not go where it was told. Somewhere, she whispered to a man she did not know, and who she knew better than any living creature besides Aurelio.

Furiosa did not live there, though. Not right now, not any more. She walked barefoot through clear water, and smelled wheatgrass on the breeze. Her mothers were just out of sight. The sky was dark except for the streaks of falling stars.

Aurelio was not with her, and that itched in her chest for a moment. Then there was a thump in her side, like a hard punch, and the water at her feet shook as she breathed in. The silence shivered, and pain shuddered through her like a seizure.

The world broke open, and there was the Fool, blurry through her one good eye, looking half-whole and healthy. There was something she had to tell him. Something so important it had cost more than her life.

Get them home. Take them home.

That’s all that mattered. Not revenge or survival. She hadn’t thought it possible when she took them from the Vault, but now. Here. The Wives, at least, could go to a place and make it home. She trusted the Fool to take them there, now that she could not.

She had always known that redemption would feel an awful lot like dying.

“No, no, no,” someone said, a man. Even softer, he said, “don’t go.” And she wished she knew who it was that he could speak to her like that. Softly.

She was walking in water again. She heard her mothers calling from behind a grove of peach trees. Just over that hill would be the Hell Cat camp of her childhood, would be a tent stitched out of flower skirts. Just over that hill, she would be safe.

Furiosa walked towards it, but something tugged her to a stop. She looked down at the red string tied around her arm; saw she had two human hands. One of them was bound with a string that stretched back over the horizon. Back to where a white sun was setting, barely visible on the horizon. But she heard a child’s laugh over the burble of the stream, and it pulled her forward.

The string stopped her again. She looked closer, picked at it with a hand she had not moved in three thousand days. It was a tube, not a string. It pierced her skin where her elbow made it thin, and again a shudder of pain ran through her and made the water shake. She didn’t want this. She wanted to be whole, and safe, and not to hurt.

“Furiosa,” a girl whispered, and it was not the name the Vuvalini had given her. It was the name she had forged herself, with one arm.

“Furiosa. Stay awake.”

“Stay with us.”

“Furiosa, stay with us.”

She breathed in, feeling waves of pain shoot through her. The cool water vanished from her feet.

She breathed in, and the peach trees vanished from the horizon.

She breathed in, and it felt like flying.


	33. The Leaving

They rode into the Citadel in silence. Furiosa had propped herself on Max’s shoulder, pointing out landmarks and headings with her good hand as he drove. The Wives and the witches took what seats they could get in the overcrowded Gigahorse.

Joe, from his place on the front, reeked of dead things left to bloat.

Epharia stifled her growl as the crowd gathered at their wheels like flies to blood. The lift was half lowered already; no one wanted to keep their Immortan waiting in his beastly car. This was too easy, too much like victory. She didn’t trust it.

She trusted even less when Max climbed out onto the hood with a shotgun pointed at him. He went slow, with his hands up, as if that made three seconds difference. But she had felt the change in him, when he said his name. When he made it his again.

If he believed in it enough, maybe such a gesture _would_ make a difference.

The Wretched pulled their god to pieces. Epharia would have been lying if she’d said there wasn’t satisfaction in that. There was little blood, by this time, but the smell of viscera, raw and putrid, was overwhelmed by the sweat-stink of the Wretched who clawed apart the Immortan’s greasy flesh.

Epharia had been standing on the medical table, looking over Max’s shoulder. Now she felt a draft at her back, turned to see the Wives standing tall and straight. This was their Gigahorse now, their lift, their Citadel. Every blink they made spoke of it.

And Furiosa. Furiosa came to stand with Max, and at the sight of her the crowd cried out. First one man, then two, then five, and then all of them were yelling her name. It solidified into words so heavy Epharia could feel them in her skull.

LET THEM UP. The Wasteland itself seemed to scream. LET THEM UP.

There were so _many_ of them, daemons and humans gaping at her. Epharia was going to shake her skin off if she didn’t get out of the cab, but outside was no better. It was like there was no air to breathe. Like the Wretched were using it all up in their cheering.

When the leaving came like this, there was not time to think about it. It was not a conscious decision for Epharia to make the jump back to the ground. She twisted her head back up to Max, who was still holding Furiosa. She could feel him now, how steady he was. His own name singing in his heart. And Epharia could not have argued against staying, not with words. It was only that she could not breathe, and her feet would not stand still, and if he didn’t get off that platform _right now_ something terrible would happen.

The leaving whispered in her ear, and Epharia could not help but listen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whooooooooooo! We're DONE! Thank you, thank you, thank you, for coming with me on this amazing trip through the Wasteland.
> 
> Oh, and don't worry, I have LOTS of stuff written for Max, Furiosa, and the Wives in their new lives. :)


End file.
